Yoga, Meditation, and Neoliberal Penality: Compliance or Resistance?

• Author: Farah Godrej
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920954537
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 75(1) 47 –60

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920954537

Political Research Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912920954537

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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 incarcera-

tion, leading to “stark and pernicious gradations of citi-

zenship” (Gottschalk 2016, 260).

Slow, incremental progress has been made in advanc-

ing 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 “improve-

ments” 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 con-

trolling marginalized populations (Kilgore 2014). The

second debate addresses whether those trapped in the sys-

tem 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

954537PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920954537Political Research QuarterlyGodrej

research-article2020

1University of California, Riverside, USA

Corresponding Author:

Farah Godrej, University of California, Riverside, 900 University

Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521, USA.

Email: godrej@ucr.edu

Yoga, Meditation, and Neoliberal

Penality: Compliance or Resistance?

Farah Godrej1

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.

Keywords

neoliberal, penality, yoga, meditation, incarceration, prison, discipline, compliance, resistance

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