Description
Book SynopsisAn estimated forty million people in the United States regularly practice yoga, and as an industry it generates over nine billion dollars annually. A major reason for its popularity is its promise of mental and physical well-being: yoga and meditation are thought to be spiritual paths to self-improvement. Yoga is also widely practiced in prisons, another large business in the United States. Prisons in all fifty states offer yoga and meditation as a form of rehabilitation. But critics argue that such practices can also have disempowering effects, due to their emphasis on acceptance, non-judgment, and non-reaction. If the root of suffering is in the mind, as the philosophy behind yoga and meditation suggests, then injustice (including mass incarceration) may be reduced to a mental state requiring coping techniques rather than a more critical mindset. Others insist that yoga can heighten people''s attention to structural violence, hierarchy, racism, and inequity. In fact, some of history'
Trade ReviewFreedom Inside? is far more than a book about yogic and meditative practices in prison. It is a reflection on the neoliberal seductions of self-help and what self-improvement means in the context of an oppressive total institution. Farah Godrej questions everything, including her role as a researcher, a volunteer, a critic of the carceral state. The result is a deeply meditative, careful, and caring book. By resisting the false dichotomies of self-help versus systemic critique, as well as the "violent/non-violent" distinction, Godrej pushes us past the deadly classifications so endemic to the prison industrial complex. * Naomi Murakawa, Princeton University, and author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America *
In this ambitious book, Farah Godrej asks after the tensions, ambivalences, and potentially transformative political work performed by yoga and meditation in the gut of the racialized carceral state. Combining decades of first-person experience as a practitioner of yoga, direct research inside the California prison system, and the sensibilities of an accomplished political theorist, Freedom Inside? is an original, boundary-crossing work that contributes to critically important questions about the relationship between individual practices of the mind, heart, and body and quiescence to—or revolt against—broader collective structures of domination and suffering. * Timothy Pachirat, author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight and Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power *
Through the lens of a four-year ethnography as a yoga and meditation instructor in prison, Godrej explores the insidious culture of individual responsibility, the widespread acceptance of responsibilization assumptions by people who volunteer in prison rehabilitation programs, and the limited but real possibilities for institutional reform and individual redemption. These are complex, abstract, and often demoralizing arguments, but Godrej brings them to life with real people, described vividly, engaged compassionately. * Keramet Reiter, University of California, Irvine, author of 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement *
Table of ContentsSection I 1. Introduction: Why Prison Yoga and Meditation? 2. Who Was I?: Scholarship, Personal Narrative, and the Testimony of the Unprotected 3. Yoga and Meditation: Historical and Contemporary Debates Section II 4. The Total Institution: The World of Mass Incarceration, Prisons, and Population-Control 5. "Rescued by Prison" or "Drinking the Kool-Aid?": Practicing Yoga and Meditation While Incarcerated 6. Mindfulness Meditation in a Men's Detention Facility Section III 7. The World of Prison Volunteers 8. "Making them Better Human Beings" or "Stirring the Pot"?: Interviews with Volunteers 9. Yogic Philosophy, Nonviolence, and Resistance in a Women's Prison, co-authored with Reighlen Jordan and Maitra 10. Conclusion
