Awake, Asleep or with Eyes Half Open: Prison Yoga Teaching, Social Justice and Prison Abolition

• In Event: Abolition, Culture, and Geography

Abstract

In this paper, I will discuss the early findings of a doctoral study exploring the motivations and objectives of prison yoga teachers (PYTs) working in UK prisons and secure establishments. Godrej (2022) has highlighted how some PYTs in America are cognisant of the racism, structural inequality and injustice that underpins and upholds the American prison industrial complex. But, at the same time, many people doing this work, see their teaching as a way to enable personal transformation that leaves oppressive and discriminatory systems untouched. The structural factors that have led to peoples’ imprisonment are ignored as individual pathology and accountability (arguably, core concepts in neoliberal ideology) override any attempts to radically reform punishment practices or abolish prisons. To what extent is this also true of UK PYTs? How cognisant are UK PYTs of these debates? Are they awake to these issues so that they question their role in upholding unethical, harmful institutions or do they blindly follow the political rhetoric and media discourses that lay blame and accountability firmly at the feet of the people they are seeking to ‘help’?

Author

• Rose Parkes, The Open University