Abstract
In this essay, I argue that a normative commitment to dismantling mass incarceration requires us to examine the effects of self-care and self-disciplinary practices within carceral spaces. I take up the specific case of the South Asian traditions of yoga and meditation. Many critics have suggested that their practices can produce pacifying, politically neutering effects through their emphases on non-judgment and non-reaction. They can teach acceptance of an unjust, immiserating reality, seen as the result of individual responsibility or pathology, rather than of structural factors. But others insist that yogic and meditative traditions can be interpreted to generate attention and resistance to social injustice. I explore the conditions under which the therapeutic, rehabilitative forms of self-discipline taught by these traditions reproduce neoliberal penality, encouraging the targets of mass incarceration to accept their own responsibility for structurally unjust outcomes. I also explore conditions under which they may undermine such penal logic by teaching attention and resistance to systemic inequity. Ultimately, the political meaning and effects of these practices are ambiguous: they can render the carceral apparatus more habitable and acceptable, or ensure that the tools of neoliberal penality are turned against the system itself.
Recent scholarly work has described mass incarceration as “a serious normative blight” on American democracy (Isaac 2015). Its specific features are by now well known: the exponential rise in the penal population; the explosion in incarceration of minorities, immigrants, and the poor; the criminalization of nonviolent drug-related offenses; a racialized regime where the structural rules guarantee discriminatory results; and the legalized discrimination and disenfranchisement that typically follow incarceration, leading to “stark and pernicious gradations of citizenship” (Gottschalk 2016, 260).
Slow, incremental progress has been made in advancing toward a public consensus in which this state of affairs is acknowledged as manifestly unjust. But even critics of the system remain divided on several important questions. This essay addresses two such debates, using the case of yoga and meditation to illustrate what is at stake in these disagreements, and their relevance for further challenges to mass incarceration. The first debate is whether efforts to challenge the prison system should focus on making prisons more therapeutic and rehabilitative. Critics of a reformed, more humane incarceration argue that “improvements” to the system simply make incarceration more efficient, not more just (Murakawa 2014). In her study of a maximum-security unit, Lorna Rhodes (2004) asks a prison administrator whether his efforts to make it more humane could be used to support the continued use of such prisons, working against systemic change. Critics sometimes accuse reformists of repackaging an unjust system through a “carceral humanism” in which prisons are recast as sites of caring social service, whitewashing the reality that they serve as sites for containing and controlling marginalized populations (Kilgore 2014). The second debate addresses whether those trapped in the system should focus on improving themselves rather than on challenging the system. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander (2012, 215) notes, “it appears that those who are trapped within it could have avoided it simply by not committing crimes. Shouldn’t the focus be on improving ourselves, rather than challenging a biased system?” Some insist on a politics of personal responsibility in which unraveling morals, poor choices, and lack of perseverance best explain the current predicament. But others warn that too much insistence on “better choices” and more “individual responsibility” can downplay the systemic dimensions of mass incarceration, ignoring society’s responsibility to address structural problems that constrain choices for marginalized communities (Gottschalk 2016, 17; Kelly 2018; Lerman and Weaver 2014, 162–69, 179–96; McCorkel 2013; Wacquant 2010, 214). As scholars show, the prison system itself uses the narrative of individual responsibility to obscure the role of social inequity even while plainly exacerbating it (Lerman and Weaver 2014, 198), yet another facet of its control mechanisms.
These debates ask us to consider whether therapeutic self-help discourses and programs can bolster the control-and-containment function of an unjust system. This essay explores such questions through the lens of non-Western practices of yoga and meditation, generally considered to be emblematic of self-discipline and self-improvement. They are also considered humane and therapeutic, in contrast to mass incarceration’s harsh, punitive character. To many, yoga and meditation may seem apolitical or innocuous, but when taught in contexts like prisons—which are both politically shaped and oriented toward population control—they can have either pernicious or emancipatory political effects. Therefore, a normative commitment to dismantling mass incarceration requires us to examine the effects of these practices within carceral spaces. In this essay, I ask: might therapeutic, self-disciplinary practices such as yoga and meditation reinforce acceptance of mass incarceration by encouraging its victims to internalize and comply with its logic? Or, might these practices have disruptive effects on mass incarceration, if they support thoughtful critique and challenge to its logic? Are these traditions used to reaffirm mass incarceration’s validity, or to call into question its legitimacy?
Yoga and meditation were introduced in U.S. prisons in the 1960s. More recently, they have exploded in popularity: one report suggests that the national network of prison 1 meditation and yoga includes “more than 185 organizations and more than 5,000 individuals,” with programs in all fifty states (Maull 2015, 1). However, our concern should not solely be with prisons or jails: the total number of people under carceral supervision—on probation, parole, or other forms of community supervision—is thought to exceed 7 million. If we conceive of carcerality as extending beyond the prison into the marginalized communities targeted for incarceration, then the dissemination of self-disciplinary practices in and around these communities is also of interest. Following Foucault (1995), I refer to “carceral” spaces rather than simply prisons or jails, indicating that our interest should extend to any context in which yoga or meditation is offered as a humane, therapeutic, self-disciplinary remedy to the problem of mass incarceration.
Many critics have suggested that the yogic, meditative traditions of South Asia can produce pacifying, depoliticizing effects through their emphases on non-judgment and non-reaction. They can foster docility and compliance, teaching acceptance of an unjust, immiserating reality, seen as the result of individual responsibility or pathology, rather than of structural factors (Carrette and King 2005; Purser 2015). If, as these traditions suggest, the root of suffering is in the mind, then the systemic injustice of mass incarceration may be reduced to a mental fabrication requiring coping techniques rather than critique. As I will demonstrate, opinion is divided as to whether such depoliticization is inherent to these traditions, or a result of Western misappropriations. Taught in a certain way, might such practices, even while relieving everyday suffering, reinforce the neoliberal logic of mass incarceration: emphasizing the causal effects of poor individual “choices,” while downplaying the discriminatory sociopolitical structure that circumscribes them (Brown 2006; Harcourt 2010)?
But others insist that yogic and meditative traditions can be interpreted to generate attention and resistance to social injustice (Keown and Prebish 2003; Sivaraksa 1992; Williams et al. 2016). Some of history’s most radical activists, including M. K. Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh (Hanh 1993; Howard 2013), trace their ethical, political commitments to their grounding in yogic or meditative traditions. They employ yogic or meditative self-cultivation to strengthen minds and bodies for disciplined, nonviolent resistance to oppression. On this view, could a socially engaged yoga and meditation undermine the pacification-and-management of the carceral state by assisting in basic self-preservation, while also providing resources for political activism and critique?
Currently, few critics of the penal system (including abolitionists) focus on self-care practices such as yoga and meditation as a target of concern. The assumption is that such practices are purely beneficial because they assist in coping with the brutality of incarceration. While this is partially true, we also have reason to be concerned about the co-optation of yoga and meditation by the system. Returning to the debates referenced earlier, these practices may lead to the entrenchment of the prison-industrial complex, if making prisons gentler and more tolerable through the veneer of therapeutic programming masks a deeper intent to control minority and poor populations. Meanwhile the excessive focus on the individual in these traditions may allow “custodial citizens” 2 to readily accept that all external circumstances are of one’s own making, to be resolved solely through self-improvement. All of this may further entrench the control functions of the system. But ultimately, the politics of these practices are also far more ambiguous: yoga and meditation can have complex and potentially subversive effects in prisons. Unlike many other forms of self-help, yoga and meditation can offer humane, therapeutic, self-improvement that simultaneously teaches political critique, emphasizing both personal growth and awareness of structural inequity. They can lead to shrinking the prison-industrial complex, not only because disadvantaged people in prisons learn to cope with their suffering, while healing and changing themselves; but also because they may become more politically conscious and galvanized. Rather than simply regurgitating the neoliberal message that individuals alone shape their destiny, they may provoke more capacious forms of self-improvement, allowing for deeper understanding of—and more skillful action to address—systemic inequities.
Here, I provide theoretical articulation of a tension unfurling in carceral spaces where yoga and meditation are taught: do the therapeutic, rehabilitative forms of self-care and self-discipline taught by these traditions align with or challenge the reformist goals of carceral humanism? Do they encourage political passivity, docility, and acceptance of responsibility for negative outcomes—are they simply “improvements” to an unjust system made more efficient? As such, are they simply modes of control and punitive supervision reborn in a softer, more “humane” guise that renders the carceral apparatus more acceptable? Alternatively, can the “self-improvement” they teach undermine mass incarceration through skillful discernment of systemic inequities, and tools for meaningful response that move beyond accommodation toward resistance?
To fully explore these questions, we will require a theoretical detour into rehabilitative penology: the notion that prisons serve the purpose of rehabilitating rather than simply punishing offenders. I argue below that this penology continues to play a dominant role, both in the carceral system and in public understandings. In its newer, more “neoliberal” iteration—a term I intend to explore more fully—rehabilitative penology serves a dual purpose: it ensures that large numbers of currently and formerly incarcerated individuals are managed most efficiently, ensuring that many of them believe in their own responsibility for their fate as well as their own reform and regulation, sidelining the role of racial and socioeconomic inequity. Through this logic, individuals make themselves more amenable to being governed through therapeutic projects of “self-improvement” that cast the prison (and its corollaries) as the site of “humane self-transformation.” Yogic, meditative practices, I show, are often interpreted in ways congruent with these logics, teaching individuals to focus on the internal mental causes of suffering, rather than on difficult or unjust external circumstances. Yet, I also argue that these practices are multivalent: they can also teach mindful attention to the systemic causes of oppression, rather than ignoring it. In so doing, these practices call our attention to the tenuous relationship between therapeutic self-care, self-discipline, and power relations.
The argument proceeds as follows. First, I demonstrate that rehabilitation, in its newer, neoliberal expression, forms the justificatory context for programs such as yoga and meditation in carceral spaces. Second, I explore the theoretical underpinnings of the yogic and meditative traditions, showing how they converge with or resist the imperatives of neoliberal rehabilitative penology. In so doing, I follow those who distinguish thoughtfully between reforms that may allow for the entrenchment of the prison system and those that may diminish it. I aim to show that yoga and meditation should be considered valuable under particular conditions: when they make custodial citizens more conscious of structural disadvantage, and more inclined to act politically and collectively in response, rather than focus only on personal betterment. In concluding, I note that this complex topic cannot be explored entirely through any single disciplinary or methodological umbrella—it requires theoretical articulation, to be followed by empirical exploration. Here, I provide the initial theoretical articulation, while the conclusion discusses implications for future empirical explorations and for the subversive potential of self-disciplinary practices in general.
The “New” Neoliberal Penality as the Context for Prison Yoga and Meditation
Rehabilitative penology, sometimes called penal welfarism, adheres to reformist goals of recidivism reduction through therapeutic justice, treatment, and education. Although many dismiss its contemporary relevance, a closer look reveals the persistence of rehabilitative penology in a new form. Increasingly, we see a combination of an older, disciplinary penology of moral reform with a newer managerial, risk- and security-oriented penology. This patchwork of contradictions forms what many criticize as a neoliberal orientation toward punishment. Below, I describe the evolution of this patchwork and suggest we consider it a “new rehabilitation”: choppily reconfigured for an increasingly neoliberal carceral regime, selectively combining moralism and statist paternalism with actuarial efficiency, and risk management through voluntarism. In turn, this orientation sets the stage for carceral yoga and meditation programs.
The rehabilitative imperative was predominant in official rationalities of penology through much of the twentieth century. Its goal was to reform and “normalize” unruly selves seen not necessarily as evil but as unfortunate victims of circumstance. This was rooted in Enlightenment notions of progress and Christian—sometimes specifically Quaker—regimes of disciplined penitence and moral education (Rodríguez 2006, 91–92). By the 1960s, it had evolved into a secular “therapeutic” carceral regime of individualized offender treatment, including twelve-step therapy (Rodríguez 2006, 93). Rehabilitation is thought to have declined in the 1970s and 1980s, as “tough on crime” policies emphasized greater punitiveness and humane incapacitation. By the early 1990s, rehabilitation was ostensibly replaced by the “new penology,” which was neither about punishing nor rehabilitating, but “about identifying and managing unruly groups,” subjecting them to high levels of surveillance and control (Feeley and Simon 1992). Prisons had become “human warehouses, designed to hold offenders until the risks they pose diminish or disappear” (McCorkel 2013, 8). In this new penology, technocratic knowledge and managerialism replaced the treatment and counseling that had characterized rehabilitation. Educational, vocational, and therapeutic programming had all but disappeared in favor of new technologies of surveillance, restraint, and population management.
This contrast between the “old” and “new” penology was thought to map on to “correction-versus-control.” But more recent scholarship rejects these dichotomies: rather than the disappearance of disciplinary “work on the soul,” it describes the intertwining of these supposedly contradictory discourses. Newer scholarship points to a continuation of the reformist project in a new guise, as older practices are resurrected under new labels. No doubt Foucault cast a long shadow on such debates: some scholars dismissed Foucault as no longer relevant because of what appeared to be the replacement of rehabilitative penology with warehousing and risk management (Dilts 2014; Lin 2002, 50). But others insist that this had always been a somewhat false dichotomy, because rehabilitative practices and policies had always been part and parcel of strategies of control, security, and surveillance (Grasso 2017; Harcourt 2010; Schept 2015, 81). And now, rehabilitation is being “revived as a central feature of risk/need analysis and penal control” (Hannah-Moffat 2005), employed in a way compatible with risk management and security. The language of personal transformation is absorbed into and helps justify a culture of control, while the rhetoric of moral reform upholds prison order through risk management (Bosworth 2007).
For instance, in the turn to the “new” penology, moralistic techniques of governing “coexist . . . with actuarial techniques of risk management” (Hannah-Moffat 1999, 72–73). Offenders are routinely categorized according to the levels of risk: low, medium, high, super-max, and so forth (Hannah-Moffat 2005, 30). This language of classification promotes the illusion of calculable, scientific objectivity. But closer examination reveals that morally laden conduct evaluations are thoroughly embedded in risk management. Prisons, parole, and probation continue to require participation in therapeutic programs; staff still favor personalized evaluations over statistical ones; and degree of cooperation with institutional programs can lower or increase one’s security classification. Risk management is informed by normative judgments about character and responsibility, which are used as data in prediction, as well as in “transforming” the risky subject (Hannah-Moffat 2005, 40).
A “Neoliberal” Penality?
In what sense can this new rehabilitation be called “neoliberal”? The term neoliberalism is used to describe a wide variety of phenomena, with little consensus on its meaning. As an economic ideology, neoliberalism refers to a radically free market, a devolution from public to private sector, and the individual as entrepreneurial and rational actor. The new penology is called “neoliberal” because it governs through economic efficiency, managerialism, and actuarial techniques of risk assessment. But neoliberalism also involves a cultural component. Here, I show that neoliberal penality relies on the selective employment of themes from the neoliberal repository, combining economic ideology with the archetype of individual subjectivity and also with contradictory, more conservative cultural themes.
As a political rationality, neoliberalism has deep effects on how subjects come to understand themselves, shaping their behavior and cultivating their sensibilities. It convenes a “free” subject who is controlled through her own freedom: a prudent “entrepreneur” rationally providing for her own needs, bearing full responsibility for the consequences of choices (Brown 2006, 694). In this way, neoliberalism exemplifies Foucault’s idea of “governmentality”: control through orchestrating the subject’s conduct toward herself (Lemke 2012). Individuals are “responsibilized” to optimize their potentials through self-governance, fulfilling the “cultural demand for entrepreneurial, disciplined, and self-regulating subjects” (Lavin 2013, 19). Good citizenship is reduced to self-care, while every social, economic, or political problem requires a personal solution (Brown 2006, 695, 704). Inequities are legitimated and depoliticized, attributed to failures of individual responsibility, self-mastery, and personal choice, rather than to structural oppression.
Contemporary penology’s “new rehabilitation” is neoliberal in this second sense: producing the “responsible, enterprising” offender, throwing back upon her the accountability for management of her own risk (O’Malley 1992, 261). Rather than the prison rehabilitating the offender, the offender makes prudent choices to ensure a self-sufficient future (Hannah-Moffat 2000, 522). Prison governance documents reveal repeated messages that the incarcerated bear responsibility for their own fate (Bosworth 2007). In lieu of the redemptive paternalism of earlier eras, prison administrations produce accountable prisoners who can be co-opted into regulating their own behavior (Bosworth 2007, 74). Education and psychological or drug treatment are redefined as “choices only prisoners can make” (Bosworth 2007, 74). Voluntarism becomes the new language of reform, as prisoners learn it is “in their interest to be law-abiding and obedient” (Bosworth 2007, 74). Those who can demonstrate that they have disciplined and improved themselves are rewarded by parole or early release. Therapeutic interventions transform and reshape conduct: “manageable criminogenic problems” are addressed through behavioral changes, a positive attitude, and amenability to normalization (Hannah-Moffat 2005, 41–43). Prisoners avert the supposedly foreseeable risks of victimization, poverty, racism, and unemployment, leaving intact the presumption that crime is the outcome of poor choices (Hannah-Moffat 2005, 43). The old rehabilitative logic is now conjoined with voluntarist, prudential, risk management.
This neoliberal penology is characterized by several contradictions. With a refreshing lack of moral judgment and a refusal to pathologize, early neoliberal economic thinkers approached crime as a question of purely rational action by homo oeconomicus (Dilts 2014). But the “new rehabilitation” conflates this rationality with the disciplinary orientation of earlier eras, construing the prisoner as prudential and voluntarist, yet employing the language of moral reform, paternalism, and punitive retribution (O’Malley 1999). The contemporary offender is both moral subject and rational actor, endowed with self-governing responsibility, yet subject to the punitive state. The available “choices” are predetermined and deemed responsible by agents of penal structure, such as judges, parole boards, correctional officers, and not offenders themselves (Hannah-Moffat 2000, 523). And, when governing-at-a-distance fails, retributive exercises of power and punitive supervision reappear (Hannah-Moffat 2000, 526). Treatment is melded with punishment in a “therapunitive” logic combining coercion and voluntarism: therapeutically oriented self-governance, buttressed by punitive security paraphernalia (Carlen and Tombs 2006).
Perhaps most paradoxical is the role of the state: it asserts its own efficiency in the realm of crime management, while organizing its own withdrawal through privatization (Wacquant 2010). Neoliberal rationality purports to devolve everything including crime to a private responsibility, but the state uses punitive incarceration as evidence of its strength, while taking on a normative duty to care for offenders (Hannah-Moffat 2005, 42). Some scholars have called this a neoliberal “fable”—rather than signifying state devolution, prisons remain a legitimate realm of state intervention, as a “novel and reworked state apparatus” continues to play a central role in incarceration (Gilmore and Gilmore 2007; Harcourt 2010). Contemporary penality thus absorbs contrasting themes: the rational, self-governing prisoner, combined with retributive punishment, disciplinary obedience, and the sovereign state as symbol of law and order. This new rehabilitation selectively mobilizes different themes from within the neoliberal and neoconservative repertoires (O’Malley 1999, 185).
“Neoliberal” Penality as Social Control
Scholars show that despite well-documented disparities, the criminal justice system teaches the principles of individual agency: “that one should take ownership of . . . one’s crimes [and] that one is being punished for individual (not societal) mistakes.” Accordingly, prisons and jails are replete with self-help and psychology programs, which emphasize behavioral changes to “inculcate[e] a sense of personal responsibility” (Lerman and Weaver 2014, 168, McKendy 2006). Meanwhile, any attempt to point to systemic factors is considered evidence of resistance to rehabilitation, which in turn may affect one’s chances for early release and parole (McKendy 2006). Many incarcerated people thus adopt the prison system’s view of themselves as flawed, recasting their life-story in a way that “emphasizes [their] own moral blameworthiness” (McCorkel 2013, 162). Returning to the two debates with which we began: critics of reformism oppose the view that the problematic features of mass incarceration are limited to “occasional, peripheral excesses” (McLeod 2015, 1161), that incarceration “done properly” can avoid racialized punishment and deliver social assistance. Instead, they argue that self-help and other therapeutic programs function “to keep the already-excluded in their place” (Carlen and Tombs 2006). Rehabilitative penology legitimates practices of control deployed to discipline individuals and govern populations—it expands and consolidates the state’s capacity for social control, as incarcerated persons become amenable to the prison’s therapeutic interventions, reconstructing their own identity and self-image in ways that prison or parole staff approve of. The new rehabilitation allows the current regime to “have its penal cake and eat it too”: to argue that prisons are benign institutions for the resettlement of wrongdoers, while claiming the mantle of a populist punitiveness designed to incapacitate those deemed as threats (Carlen and Tombs 2006, 342).
Meanwhile, this logic of “take-responsibility-and-improve” also reinforces a discourse of criminality that occludes attention from systemic causes of incarceration. It contributes to racist and capitalist logics, proposing solutions grounded in redemptive change while constructing a pathological actor in need of reformation, whose actions were unattached to structural constraints (Schept 2015, 68–69). The American public remains wedded to an account of crime associated with the “old penology”—individualistic and moralistic, with structural analyses sidelined by a focus on “willful” individuals (Simon and Feeley 1995, 170–74). The persistence of rehabilitative penology reminds us of the “genius of the current caste system”: it appears voluntary, avoidable through better choices and behaviors (Alexander 2012, 215). Mass incarceration “depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate” (Alexander 2012, 248). This supplements the prison’s control function, teaching acceptance to an already-marginalized population facing a system designed to routinize their repeated return to prison.
Acknowledging neoliberal penality impacts our appreciation of practices like yoga and meditation, giving us good reasons to worry about their co-optation. But it is also possible for these tools of neoliberal penality to be turned against the system itself. Rehabilitative programs of self-care or self-discipline can produce self-aware subjects ready for resistance, instead of docile, compliant ones. Yoga and meditation can allow the intended targets of neoliberal penality to survive and self-sustain, perhaps even developing heightened awareness of their own oppression, along with the mental and physical strength to undertake resistance. Rather than rejecting all reforms, attention can usefully be turned to the precise shape such reform takes, a lesson learned from prison abolitionists. Abolitionists simultaneously hold to a radical vision of a world where prisons are rendered obsolete, and an interim set of strategies—known as “non-reformist reforms”—that seem consistent with carceral humanism, but do not strengthen the existing system. While they oppose “reformist” reforms that improve the reach and efficacy of the system, such as say, surveillance technologies, they have fought for non-reformist reforms such as ending overcrowding, solitary confinement, and cash bail, decriminalizing drug use, sentencing reform, and expanding alternatives to incarceration (Berger, Kaba, and Stein 2017; Gilmore and Kilgore 2019). Abolitionists remind us that we must consider whether reforms entrench or subvert the prison-industrial complex, even if the boundary between reformist and non-reformist reforms is fuzzier than we think. They demonstrate that reforms ostensibly designed to bring about a more benevolent penality can be directed toward the diminishment of the penal system in the long run. In the same way, practices such as yoga and meditation may appear to create governable citizens through the facade of a humane, therapeutic incarceration, but may ultimately subvert the system by combining yogic and meditative training with critical consciousness. It is to these possibilities that I now turn.
Yoga and Meditation in the U.S. Carceral Context
Rehabilitative penology is deeply influential on public discourse about the purpose of yoga and meditation in prisons. In their current, most popular form, yoga or meditation may be complicit with the carceral project of producing self-governing, manageable subjects who have internalized the message that incarceration is “their own fault.” As a result, these practices may turn into “alternative” forms of carceral supervision, functioning as supplements to—rather than substitutes for—it. But in another guise, these carceral self-care practices could also lead to the shrinking of the prison-industrial complex. Depending on how they are taught and discussed, these practices may either legitimate or subvert the neoliberal project of reform-as-control, the most important framework for self-care within the carceral context. In tracing these possibilities, I now examine two sets of literatures: first, public discourse about the purpose of yoga and meditation in prisons, and second, the theoretical underpinnings of yoga and meditation, along with critiques of their possible depoliticizing effects.
The little existing research on prison yoga and meditation is mostly empirical and psychological, designed to quantify observable effects on behavioral outcomes such as self-reflection, impulse control, and violence, assuming that incarceration is the result of individual choices or criminogenic tendencies (Dafoe and Stermac 2013; Orme-Johnson 2011; Rainforth, Alexander, and Cavanaugh 2003; Samuelson et al. 2007). Theoretical or qualitative explorations that examine the potential for political critique or complicity are virtually nonexistent. 3 Accordingly, transformative rehabilitation appears to constitute the most powerful current justification for yoga and meditation in prisons. The most oft-stated purpose in the literature of predominant organizations is recidivism prevention and crime reduction (Maull 2015). Emphasis is on “the effort to reform our criminal justice institutions and processes,” offering “the opportunity for healing and transformation” (Carlin 2015, 2; Maull 2015, 8). But this transformation is uncritically conflated with “the efficient management of incarcerated individuals . . . support[ing] prisoners in developing healthy coping mechanisms and pro-social attitudes and behaviors” (Maull 2015, 8). The influential Prison Yoga Project (PYP, n.d.) describes incarcerated people as needing to “take personal responsibility” and “[behave] in a different way,” learning to make “positive personal and pro-social choices.” PYP trainees report that it “enable[s] offenders to recognize the harm they have caused and accept full responsibility for their wrongdoing” (Osbourne 2016, 79–80).
Leaders of these organizations explicitly state that incarceration results mostly from “bad individual choices” and a lack of responsibility (Kalliopeia Foundation 2020). Incarcerated people are referred to as “perpetrators” suffering from a lack of self-awareness and emotional self-regulation (Carlin 2015, 7, 9), vulnerable to “criminogenic” attitudes and personality traits (Maull 2015, 8–9). Despite acknowledgment of systemic and structural inequities, the focus of change is the dysfunctional mind-set and criminal attitudes of incarcerated individuals (Carlin 2015, 3, 8; Maull 2015, 8–10). Some literature acknowledges the disproportionate harm caused to marginalized communities (Prison Mindfulness Institute 2016, 4), due to the “combat mentality” of corrections officers and other “social biases” that lead to a “tragedy of social justice” (Carlin 2015, 11, 13). However, the overwhelming emphasis is on addressing the inhumanity of the criminal justice system through “facilitating inner change” (Prison Mindfulness Institute 2016, 4), which is equated with systemic change. The “greatest gift” to incarcerated persons is the “freedom to choose certain behaviors over others,” the recognition that “we create and invite much of what happens to us” (Crisp 2002, 14). Legal, institutional, and political change are certainly important but should not be emphasized more than inner change (Carlin 2015, 3). Those caught in the web of unjust structures must become more self-aware and responsible, overcoming their conditioning. These organizations underscore a public narrative of making “criminals” less inclined toward criminality, rehabilitating them through moral transformation and management, while reinforcing messages about incarceration as largely correlated to individual flaws rather than structural inequities.
Let us now explore how yogic or meditative traditions may philosophically support or subvert rehabilitative transformation as disciplinary control. What follows focuses on Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, because most yoga and meditation in U.S. prisons emerge from these traditions. My treatment does not seek to be comprehensive, but to address the aspects of each tradition which appear regularly in carceral contexts. Hinduism’s yogic traditions include both meditative and postural practice. The word yoga refers to disciplined self-mastery and transcendence, aiming toward an extraordinary state of consciousness, usually defined as union with the divine (Feuerstein 1998). The yogic tradition is tethered to the renunciatory mainstream of Hindu philosophy, requiring controlled withdrawal of the senses from the realm of materiality. Orthodox Hindu elites and scholars have “construe[d] ascetic disciplines and political actions as incongruous”: transcendence of the phenomenal world is typically more valuable than involvement in worldly, socioeconomic processes (Howard 2013, 16–17). This leads to a radical individualism in which one’s own quest for liberation trumps social obligations. A key text, the Bhagavad Gita, teaches non-dualism, yoga’s predominant ontology: what appear as worldly distinctions between good and evil, pain and pleasure, are part of the same divine consciousness with which everything ultimately reunites. The goal is to detach from this world, to see the fluctuations of the mind as symptoms of illusory materiality, rising above the flux of ever-changing mental states.
Many prison contemplative programs adopt practices from Buddhism, which displays both continuity with and divergence from its predecessor Hinduism. Buddhism shares with Hinduism the recognition of the flux of the material world, adding that the human condition is inherently one of dukkha or suffering, arising from the tendency to grasp impermanent things or conditions (Gethin 1998, 61–62). It is not objects or conditions that cause suffering, but our attachment to them—thus, we create our own suffering. The purpose of meditative training is a mind that rests in ease and contentment despite unstable external conditions. Common to various traditions, whether Hindu or Buddhist, is the notion of cultivating acceptance for, rather than judging or struggling against, external conditions.
Contemporary American Buddhists (many of whose writings are disseminated in prisons) emphasize that the root of suffering and happiness is in our minds. We are better off working with our mind instead of dealing with outer circumstances: this will “alleviate the suffering that seems to come from outside” (Chodron 2013, 3). Along with this comes the lack of an “objective reality.” Most Buddhist traditions subscribe to a version of non-dualism, although somewhat different from its yogic predecessor. Largely shorn of Hinduism’s belief in divinity, Buddhism insists on a fundamental emptiness: everything we perceive is prone to decay. This applies particularly to the notion of separate human selves. The world around us, indeed our very selfhood, is not only unstable and impermanent, it is also a construction of the mind. “The untrained mind is always fabricating ideas and opinions, views and problems,” writes Jon Kabat-Zinn, a widely read American Buddhist. The mind trained in meditation “detects fabrication as . . . it is occurring”—the fluctuations of this mind tend to “damp down considerably if they are not . . . reacted to” (Kabat-Zinn 2006, 464–65).
Crucial here is the notion that problems are not in the circumstances of our lives but in our reactions to them. The more we “watch the mind’s constructs arise and pass away,” the more we realize that the concept “problem” is “just that . . . an interpretation of a situation” (Kabat-Zinn 2006, 462, 465). Tibetan teacher Kelsyang Gyatso is even more blunt: “Our problems do not exist outside our mind . . . the real nature of problems is our own feelings, which are part of our mind” (Gyatso 2007, 3). We “turn situations into problems, dilemmas or elaborate melodramas” (Kabat-Zinn 2006, 463). Steady, dispassionate observation of the mind is the most important purpose of meditative practice, along with the ability to release its fabrications without striving, grasping, or judgment.
Perhaps the most popular form of practice is “mindfulness,” a secularized adaptation of Buddhist meditation for self-help. Mindfulness is a broad tent, but its best-known iteration is mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) pioneered by Kabat-Zinn. Its use for pain and stress reduction has been adopted in hospitals, prisons, schools, corporate offices, and other settings. The clinical application of MBSR has spread to psychotherapy, for the treatment of conditions such as depression and anxiety, and has become the object of much scientific research. Kabat-Zinn (2003, 149) describes MBSR as “a vehicle for the effective training of medical patients,” allowing people to “assume . . . responsibility for their own well-being.” Training in mindfulness entails the cultivation of a “nonjudging, nonreactive mind . . . without trying to achieve anything, reject anything”; the “orientation of nonstriving” and “letting go . . . [of] expectations, goals, and aspirations”; and “nonattachment to outcome” (Kabat-Zinn 2003, 148–50).
There are many concerns about Western appropriations of these traditions. Some argue that they commodify the search for meaning, or lead to an individualization of experience via withdrawal into an inner realm, precluding social analysis and engagement and producing a politically neutering effect by reinforcing political apathy. The emphases on acceptance, non-judgment, and the individual self may isolate both the causes and effects of structurally determined outcomes, rather than highlight social injustice, or encourage action. If distinctions between good and evil are fabrications of the mind, sociopolitical injustice may be reduced to an illusion: “our beliefs,” Chodron (2013, 159) notes, “are an excellent opportunity to have a good laugh about the human condition.” Buddhist-inspired political action becomes difficult, claims one scholar, because non-dualism discourages right-versus-wrong analyses, showing that such feelings are ultimately illusory (Gross 2006, 225). Meanwhile, “most political problems . . . are caused by people with strong attachment to their own views” (Gyatso 2007, 4). Because enlightenment is the solution to all woes, meditation is the only useful response to issues such as racism or sexism. On what grounds can a practitioner make ethical judgments about injustice, or strive to change it, if she is required to cultivate non-attachment, non-striving, and acceptance of circumstances?
Critics charge that this atomized version of meditative practice can be employed as a palliative to justify the social ills of individualist consumer-capitalist societies, instead of addressing them (Carrette and King 2005; Purser and Loy 2013). Psychologized or medicalized versions (such as MBSR) come under particular fire for refashioning meditation into a banal self-help technique that assumes individuals are responsible for their own “healing” (Purser 2015, 35; Purser and Loy 2013). By suggesting that suffering and healing are located inside one’s head, these teachings may make individuals more manageable through self-help premised on a “highly privatized sense of self and neoliberal conceptions of subjectivity . . . withdrawn from the public sphere.” In turn, this “covertly depoliticize[s] socio-economic problems, localizing the causes of distress and unhappiness as . . . strictly internal and within the individual” (Purser 2015, 37, 42), without ever raising the possibility that the “difficult life” is itself a result of society. A spirituality separate from social justice is “a sedative for coping with an oppressive and difficult world” (Carrette and King 2005, 85). It individualizes oppression by claiming “it is always your problem, deal with yourself, not with society,” continually reasserting the “freedom” to create one’s own reality. This “neutered, apolitical approach . . . has nothing to say on the structural difficulties that we live with . . . it merely helps us function better in [them]” (Moore 2014).
Yoga or meditation in carceral contexts can converge with both aspects of the new rehabilitation described earlier, which merges the actuarial goals of risk management and population management with the disciplinary, moral task of personal transformation. Much discourse about yoga and meditation revolves around their efficacy for behavioral modification and impulse control (YJ Editors 2013). The palliative potential of meditative techniques may support the domestication of carceral subjects, making them manageable and penitent through practices that promote acceptance and stillness rather than criticism of the system (Lyons and Cantrell 2016). The logic that teaching yoga or meditation to incarcerated people can “keep them calm” or make them “better-behaved” is ubiquitous (Orme-Johnson 2011; Samuelson et al. 2007). Yogic or meditative practice can serve the managerial, security-oriented goal of “new” rehabilitation, if inner peace means a state of compliance rather than resistance toward carceral logic.
Meanwhile, the other aspect of the new rehabilitation requires a moral transformation stemming from self-governance and self-optimization. As yoga’s self-discipline converges with neoliberalism’s self-surveillance, many practitioners may become perfect subjects of neoliberalism: “self-disciplined, driven by the logic of choice, responsible . . . geared toward progressive self-cultivation” (Godrej 2017, 785). Yogic self-mastery can support a disciplinary project that fulfills neoliberalism’s demand for self-regulating subjects who internalize responsibility for all outcomes. The language and logic of yoga and meditation involve steady cultivation of both body and soul through attentiveness and reflection, learning to discipline and transform the self, inquiring within for the sources of one’s present circumstances, and making “different choices.”
In so doing, these traditions can fulfill what Foucault would call disciplinary and biopolitical goals: the moral reform of the individual, as well as the strategic management of entire populations. Meditative and yogic practices may reinforce the neoliberal slant of rehabilitative penology through micro-interventions that manage custodial citizens by co-opting them into governing themselves. The notion that suffering is created by one’s mind can lead to a deep individualization of injustice and misfortune on one hand, and strategies for amelioration on the other, shifting the burden for outcomes onto individual failures of self-cultivation. Yoga or meditation may become a means for emotional self-management: a retooling of emotional-cognitive terrain to accept an unjust, miserable reality reconceived as personal choice. We can accept the present moment and deal with our mind that is telling us to want more than this grueling life that will keep us mired in poverty and oppression. 4 Meanwhile, the same logic circulates among the non-incarcerated, reifying the prison as the site of penitence and redemption: so long as it is reformed to become more “humane,” it is more habitable and thus palatable.
To many Westerners, this convergence of yogic and meditative traditions with neoliberal penality may not seem intuitive, given that mainstream interpretations of these traditions are so apolitical. Occasionally, yoga and meditation are also thought to encourage a vaguely countercultural outlook because they are associated in the popular imagination with less individualistic or violent cultures beyond the West. Yogic or meditative metaphysics stand in contrast to the redemptive Judeo-Christian penitence for sin, the foundation of rehabilitative penology. Non-Western traditions are presumed to present an alternative to the moralistic disciplines of Abrahamic faiths, because they are associated with essentialized images of the so-called “peaceful” and “nonviolent” cultures of Asia, in contrast to harsh, punitive American prison culture. Whether because they are considered apolitical or fuzzily countercultural, their potential for complicity with this apparatus may not be obvious to many American practitioners.
But this compliance with the logic of the prison need not be the only outcome of yogic and meditative practice. Scholars are divided on whether the depoliticizing effects of meditative practice are inherent to the traditions, or result from their secularized appropriation (Carrette and King 2004; Purser and Loy 2013). Some insist that individualistic interpretations of Buddhism arise from mis-readings, or from Western appropriations that detach these teachings from their foundations in Buddhist theology. The application of meditative techniques in state-sponsored settings requires them to be secular or scientific, devoid of religious affiliation. One result is the unmooring of Buddhist teaching from its rich heritage of ethical reflection, and its facile transposition from the religious domain into clinical, therapeutic contexts (Purser 2015, 31).
Some Buddhist scholars note an ethical contradiction in Buddhist teaching: it sometimes claim[s] that the best course of action is to avoid taking sides because no real difference can be found . . . while at other times clearly urging that choices be made between what to cultivate and what to avoid. (Gross 2006, 228)
But many scholars of socially engaged Buddhism take seriously the necessity of distinguishing right from wrong, arguing that Buddhists cannot hide behind metaphysical non-duality to avoid the ethical issues brought up by politics (Gross 2006, 227). They insist Buddhist ethical teachings lead to a critical, activist orientation toward injustice in society. Rather than a means to personal, private salvation, these ethical teachings are designed to help us overcome our attachment to the individual self, acting to end the suffering of others through counteracting greed, ill-will, and delusion. Buddhist ethics hold that all beings exist in a causal web of interdependence that Thich Nhat Hanh refers to as “interbeing.” What the Buddha taught was not a mindfulness-based intervention for people to simply “feel better about themselves, [or] . . . [improve] their concentration so that they could obtain even more wealth” (Purser 2015, 37). Rather, uprooting our attachment to an ostensibly independent (but ultimately illusory) self requires us to overcome our separation from others and identify with their suffering. Thus, meditative practice involves living one’s life for the sake of all beings, not just oneself. Buddhist ethical precepts are interpreted so that issues of social justice become foregrounded through critiques of consumerism, violence, exploitation, and inequality (Hanh 1993; Keown and Prebish 2003; Sivaraksa 1992; Williams et al. 2016).
Accordingly, some suggest that meditative practices “may have more capacity to lead to effective political action than other prison rehabilitation programs” (Lyons and Cantrell 2016, 3). The principle of non-duality and the lack of distinction between self and other may have an empowering, anti-hierarchical effect, if taught with humility and a “recognition of sameness” between instructor and incarcerated. When teachers invite the incarcerated into practice, rather than “directing” or “teaching” them, it may foster agency and decenter power relations. Instead of being treated as patients to be fixed, the meditating prisoner is an empowered equal. Unlike other rehabilitative programs, meditative traditions imply no inherent deficit, nor do they require labels such as “alcoholic,” “addict,” or “criminal” (Lyons and Cantrell 2016, 8–9). Meanwhile, yoga and meditation may heighten awareness of oppression and injustice. Instead of “checking out” in moments of experiencing oppression, such practice might allow one to develop keen awareness of such phenomena. Instead of repressing or ignoring such experiences—which may lead to passivity—practitioners may “consciously [pay] attention” and develop a greater understanding of their roots (Hick and Furlotte 2009, 9). Meditative practice, rather than being pacifying or accommodationist, can be change-oriented, fostering awareness of well-worn habits, and of negative images internalized by the socially disadvantaged. It can illuminate past conditioning or beliefs, making “the personal political” through awareness of injustice and oppression (Hick and Furlotte 2009, 14–17).
There are lively debates about whether traditional Buddhist teachings contain such an explicit focus on social justice, or whether socially engaged Buddhism is a modern reinterpretation. But the rich scholarship suggests that many Buddhists—both Western and non-Western—interpret their tradition in a political and even revolutionary manner. Similar arguments have been made about Hinduism’s yogic traditions. None other than M. K. Gandhi interpreted Hinduism’s key text, the Bhagavad Gita, to call for sociopolitical activism. For Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other spiritual leaders, these spiritual practices were necessarily political—that is, wedded to collective, revolutionary goals—and called for resisting injustice through active, provocative, even disobedient, means. For these thinkers, compliance, passivity, or quietism were by no means the correct interpretation of their traditions (Godrej 2012).
How might this more political version of yoga and meditation be taught to custodial citizens, and how might that change the impact of carceral self-care? Yoga classes taught in prisons could, for instance, combine postural practice (or asana) with philosophical discussions of core yogic principles such as satya (truth) and ahimsa (nonviolence). Instead of encouraging only withdrawal into the inward-oriented realm of self-cultivation, such classes might also draw attention to the truth of systemic injustice, while discussing how to address it nonviolently, both within and outside prisons. Or, consider a class on Buddhism within a jail or prison setting. Instead of exhorting participants to focus solely on how their minds create their individualized suffering, volunteers could lead discussions of the systemic, social, or collective causes of suffering. Meditative practices could focus on moment-to-moment awareness of structural injustice; volunteers could ask participants to consider how one’s personal self-improvement could be skillfully combined with efforts toward social or political change, through the lens of Buddhist concepts such as “right speech” and “right action.” In this way, carceral self-care could combine acknowledgments of personal responsibility with understandings of larger structures that limit choices. As a result, these practices may produce socially and politically conscious citizens who can engage in personal reflection and growth, while noting that self-development is constrained by social, political, and legal arrangements which make it difficult to “simply choose not to commit crimes” (Alexander 2012, 184). If those behind bars can avail of resources to better understand, navigate, and even change a world stacked against them, such programs may end up having a far more subversive effect than intended.
Conclusions and Further Research
No doubt yoga and meditation serve an important ethical purpose: assisting with coping and survival amid the dehumanization and violence of incarceration. Notice, then, that we need not dismiss this goal, nor discourage the development of self-reflection, self-improvement, or cognitive skills for avoiding recidivism. As Alexander (2012, 216) acknowledges, urging marginalized individuals to live up to high ideals is not wrong, for everyone has the “ability to choose . . . how we respond to the circumstances of our lives.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore is clear that abolitionists should not be so starry-eyed as to believe that no incarcerated person has ever caused harm (Kushner 2019). Thus, even those most fervently opposed to prisons grant that those who are imprisoned (or otherwise targeted by the carceral state) may require tools for self-improvement. Advocating for systemic change does not preclude promoting individual growth—in fact, for Gandhi, as for many other activists, the two necessarily go together.
But it is misleading to imagine that individual improvement and structural justice can be valued equally by the carceral system. As the foregoing discussion on neoliberal penality noted, the entire punitive apparatus perpetuates the idea that people who end up in prisons deserve to be there. This relentless beating of the “personal responsibility” drum—both in prisons and in society at large—makes it unlikely that a political consciousness will develop among marginalized populations, given the “omnipresent message that ‘they alone were responsible for their outcomes in life, including the mistakes that led to their confinement’” (Lerman and Weaver 2014, 168). As a result, such populations can end up being passive, quietist, and accommodating toward the powerful forces that structure their lives—too weary to develop the vocabulary or consciousness to address race- or class-based disadvantage, or to mobilize politically (Lerman and Weaver 2014).
This suggests that things are highly skewed in the direction of over-emphasizing personal responsibility. If presented solely as a tool for individual transformation, yoga and meditation may exacerbate this skewing toward depoliticization, further sidelining necessary conversations about systemic inequality, and ensuring that mass incarceration becomes more effective and more palatable, both to the general public and to those targeted by it. These practices may succeed in evacuating politics from relevant debates about systemic issues, by reducing everything to individual volition. In such cases, yoga and meditation may end up supporting the political sedation already underway in prisons and in society at large. Alternatively, as suggested here, the practices may serve as a much-needed corrective that chips away at the edifice of mass incarceration, subverting neoliberal penality through greater awareness of systemic oppression, and skills for both survival and resistance. Taught and practiced in this latter way, yoga and meditation can intervene in the debates I referenced at the beginning of this essay: they can offer a middle path between over-emphasizing personal responsibility to the exclusion of structural justice, while ensuring that therapeutic, humane reforms are not over-emphasized to the neglect of shrinking the carceral system. If they produce politically conscious rather than docile citizens, they can lead to the diminishment of the system: both because those caught up within it are learning to live differently and because they are more socially and politically aware and active.
Meanwhile, non-Western traditions of spirituality and self-care exert sociocultural pressure on public discourse—increasingly prevalent and influential in everyday life, exhorting Americans to greater self-care through self-discipline and self-improvement. Some argue that preoccupations with self-care are overly individualized and inward-looking, discouraging attention to collective causes of social suffering and becoming, in the process, a handmaiden to unjust power relations. Others assert that far from being the province of hapless unreflexive victims unwittingly serving corporate or authoritarian masters, self-care can be emancipatory, especially when consciously chosen. As Foucault himself notes, “technologies of the self” can easily be absorbed or appropriated by power relations, but they may also encourage critical reflection and political change (Rabinow 1997). More recently, in reflecting on inequity, some argue that therapeutic self-discipline—rightly understood—can sustain activism and collective resistance. Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and Angela Davis have insisted that such self-care is necessarily political, even “an act of warfare” (Lorde 1998). Yoga and meditation illustrate the tenuous relationship between self-care and power in our contemporary moment: self-care is subject to co-optation by power relations, yet can remain resistant and vigilant toward such co-optation. In turn, this has relevance for public discourse around mass incarceration—whether the neoliberal insistence on individualized self-discipline continues to circulate, both within and outside prisons, as the remedy to a problem that is structural and systemic. If, as Foucault suggests, the disciplinary project occurs across the spectrum of the “carceral”—in schools, hospitals, and other therapeutic, educational settings—this requires consistent attention to the dissemination and reception of yogic and meditative practices in all such spaces.
In concluding, I note this essay has necessarily traversed diverse terrain, ranging from criminology to wellness studies, South Asian thought, and even comparative political theory, in order to ask broader questions about how power—and resistance to it—work. Future work must explore the empirical dimensions of these issues, without which no firm conclusions can be drawn. Further research must determine precisely how these logics of therapeutic self-discipline are circulating, in prisons as well as in broader contexts of carceral supervision. Interviews and fieldwork can tell us something about how volunteers and staff disseminate these ideas. Do they uncritically reproduce the logic of behavioral modification, using yoga or meditation to “reform” prisoners, parolees, probationers, and other carceral targets away from “criminal” impulses? Or do they challenge these discourses through a more politically attuned understanding, teaching possible resources for subversion? Meanwhile, interviews with formerly incarcerated practitioners can tell us how these ideas are being received. Are the recipients uncritically accepting individualist logics of self-improvement? Or, do they reinterpret them as resources for political resistance? In turn, how do these ideas impact their reaction to logics underlying mass incarceration? As Lerman and Weaver might ask, what forms of political consciousness around structural disadvantage do these practices either inhibit or make possible?
Meanwhile, such explorations cannot remain neutral—they require a normative commitment to dismantling mass incarceration, rather than simply making it more humane or tolerable, or teaching people to avoid getting caught up in it. Readers may wonder whether such a commitment must necessarily be abolitionist. Not all critics of “humanizing” prison reforms—including those who worry about over-emphasizing personal responsibility—are necessarily abolitionists. Moreover, the distinction between abolitionists and their reformist counterparts starts to break down when we consider that many abolitionists have advocated for incremental reform efforts as part of their commitment to a world without prisons. Hence, a normative commitment to dismantling mass incarceration in the present should not require us to settle the question of whether prisons should ever exist in any form, or in a more just society of the future. Rather, the immediate task is to dismantle the manifestly unjust arrangements that constitute this system, 5 a goal that should be shared by otherwise-diverse groups of opponents, wherever they fall on the spectrum between “reformist” and “abolitionist,” and whatever their commitments to emphasizing personal responsibility as against structural injustice (or vice versa). This normative commitment, I argue, is precisely what should make us empirically interested in investigating how self-discipline interacts with power relations. In turn, this will require digging much further into the messy terrain that I have only briefly been able to sketch out here.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Naomi Murakawa, Andrew Dilts, Lisa Miller, Sarah Pemberton, Melvin Rogers, Kirstie McClure, Naveed Mansoori, Thomas Dumm, Cristina Beltrán, Anthony Grasso, Charles Lee, Kevin Olson, Jessica Lopez, and Stefan Kehlenbach for their commentary and feedback at various conferences and colloquia. Three anonymous reviewers for Political Research Quarterly also provided constructive critique that improved this essay, as did graduate students in a political theory seminar at the University of California, Riverside and attendees at a political theory colloquium at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Author’s Note
Some of the references have been retained, despite their current non-functional status. As they were active during the author’s research, interested parties may reach out to the author for further detail at the author’s corresponding address.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
