Prison Yoga as a Correctional Alternative?: Physical Culture, Rehabilitation, and Social Control in Canadian Prisons

These two quotations, from individuals at opposite ends of the social hierarchy, demonstrate the ways in which meditative yoga,2 an activity increasingly offered to prisoners around the world, is a highly politicized form of physical culture.3 On the one hand, for many people in privileged positions, including conservative politicians, prison yoga is framed as a luxury that should be denied to prisoners; such a framing is in lockstep with broader conservative discourses that represent prisoners as unredeemable individuals who are coddled with luxuries that many citizens cannot afford (see McElligott, 2007, for a discussion of the deployment of these discourses in the Canadian province of Ontario). On the other hand, yoga appears to be a meaningful and beneficial physical practice for some prisoners. Advocates of prison yoga, such as the UK-based Prison Phoenix Trust or various Canadian prison yoga organizations, frame it as a tool for the rehabilitation of offenders that will reduce violence within institutions and facilitate more effective societal integration of former prisoners. While certainly highlighting the politicization of prison yoga, these competing frames obscure some of the ways in which yoga is interpreted by various actors and in which it contributes to social and power relations within correctional environments.