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At the end of a short meditation exercise where students were asked to bring attention to their breath and its movement through the body, the teacher asked the young people seated on yoga mats around the room how they were feeling. “Calm.” “Relaxed.” “Good.” “Energized.” “Awake.” “Inside myself.” The students, all Black and Hispanic male clients of an Alternative to Incarceration (ATI) program for 16-to-24-year-olds had just come to the end of a class taught by the Lineage Project, a New York City non-profit that offers mindfulness-based classes to youth in various settings such as detention centres, Alternative to Incarceration/Detention (ATI/ATD) programs, and suspension schools. For the past hour, the students had participated in a class that included a discussion around a mindfulness theme (i.e., acceptance), a sequence of yoga poses, or asanas, and some seated meditation. Lineage Project teachers have been teaching these skills to troubled youth in New York City since 1998. Their work, forged over years working with youth in often challenging settings, is grounded in an expanding body of literature that suggests that youth, especially vulnerable youth, can derive important benefit from learning mindfulness-based practices such as yoga and meditation.
The criminal justice system is replete with challenges to rehabilitation. Traditional responses to treating violence and aggression, including incarcerating offenders, are ineffective. This is particularly true when dealing with youth, for whom the intersections of low socio-economic status, mental health issues, and race can create a pressing crisis and high rates of reoffending. Increasingly punitive strategies to reduce crime have not produced the desired results. Furthermore, there is minimally adequate research on which to base “what works” with offenders (Sherman et al., 1998). Many of the same problems that were endemic to prison life in the early 1970s — overcrowding; too much time spent in cells; gang rape; the curtailment of movement, association, and contact with the outside world; lack of program capacity; the paucity of meaningful prison work or vocational skills training; and the polarization between inmates and custodial staff — continue to be features of contemporary correctional practice.
Contemporary solutions to the problem of violence at the individual level usually involve punitive social control mechanisms. As a humane alternative, meditation programs within correctional institutions are experiencing growth and greater acceptance in North America. A handful of scholarly and anecdotal studies report reduced violence, aggression, and anger and increased self-awareness and hopefulness among inmates who take up meditation and contemplative practices (Phillips, 2008; Parkum & Stultz, 2000). In this chapter we explore the mechanisms of reducing violence and aggression and combating recidivism through meditation programs and practices. We situate this phenomenon within a larger socio-cultural framework that considers the gender-specific subjectivities of a majority male correctional population.