/ David Pescovitz / 9:32 am Tue Feb 16, 2010

Yoga to reduce prison sentences

Convicts in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh can get out of jail early if they develop a regular yoga practice. For every three months that a prisoner practices, his prison sentence is reduced by two weeks.
The state's inspector general of prisons, Sanjay Mane, said: "Yoga is good for maintaining fitness, calming the behaviour, controlling anger and reducing stress. "When a prisoner attends yoga sessions and fulfils some other conditions, he will be considered for a remission if his jail superintendent recommends his case."

An inmate at Gwalior central jail, Narayan Sharma - who has now moved on to become an instructor - says it helps to banish the "angry thoughts" in his mind.

"It was these thoughts that made me commit crimes," he said.

"India inmates take yoga to reduce their jail sentences"

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  1. Vipassana has also been offered in Indian prisons. Not sure if it results in a reduction of time served, but it is certainly a useful tool for anyone, in prison or out of it.

  2. So, here in the US, there are fairly frequent attempts(some rather more blatant than others) to bring Christian indoctrination to the prison population, with various means of suasion to induce the prisoners to be good little godbots, if they want to see earlier release. It generally ends up being pretty creepy, and makes the establishment clause a sad panda.

    Anybody want to place their bets on whether the yoga classes in this case are the more-or-less-secularized stretching and mindfulness stuff or a clever plot by India’s festering Hindu right-wingers?

    1. You’re confusing yoga with religion – Indians don’t conflate the two AFAIK. Also, please don’t compare Hinduism and Christianity. The Hinduism I grew up with and observed around me is more of a philosophy, a mindset. Again AFAIK, Hindus don’t indoctrinate or evangelize, generally speaking. Neither does any Hindu God explicitly require you to “behave yourself” lest you be smited, these are, from what I learned from 12 years of Catholic school, more Christian constructs. That’s why the words “Hindu right wing” bug me so … by definition, they shouldn’t exist, sadly they do.

      So the idea of using guilt and punishment in the name of Hinduism would be odd … as a Hindu, I’d laugh if something said that to me! The concept of karma on the other hand, that’s another story. But hey, we all need something to keep us in line! :-)

  3. I dunno phisrow. I am absolutely adamant about my atheism and I’ve done the ten-day 100-hour Vipassana course. It’s really not a brainwashing deal. They’re teaching you a discipline, teaching you how to do insight meditation. It isn’t about magic. And yeah, at the very end of some of the lectures about seven days into the course, they throw in some silliness about reincarnation. But that’s very easy to ignore. And the practice is helpful.

    Meditation is useful. Yoga is useful. There are going to be people, always, who try to throw in some woo-woo. That happens in all kinds of situations. But learning how to follow your breathing or to do downward facing dog is not the same thing as having bible baloney thrown at a captive audience.

    It is more than annoying the way organized religion claims to be the authority on morality and good and evil. They’ve had thousands of years to improve mankind, and they have FAILED. Mostly, they cause more evil and more harm. But it isn’t questioned, that religion is inherently good. So you get better treatment in prison if you say you believe in Jesus. But that’s pretty much the way in works out in the world. Just sign up with Jesus so you don’t do such hard time in purgatory or Hell or wherever. It’s not about ethics, it’s about sucking up to the big warden in the sky and rather sickening.

    The people who get power and profit from organized religion do not want to see people loose their fear of death, of the unknown. They don’t want evil to go away. If people got wiser and kinder, all the priests and rabbis and imams would be out of a job.

    Yoga and meditation don’t have to be about Buddhism or Hinduism, any more than every pot luck supper has to be run by Quakers.

    Isn’t this more productive than pounding out license plates?

    1. They’ve had thousands of years to improve mankind, and they have FAILED.

      That’s not so simple to say. Looking at western civilization before the rise of Christianity, for instance, there was an era of gladitorial bloodsports, common infanticide, and widespread slavery. Those are all very rare now, and I think that counts as an improvement to mankind.

      Is that simply a result of new philosophical ideals, or does Christianity deserve any part of the credit? I’m an atheist, too, and I don’t believe religion is at all necessary to reject any of those things. Historically, though, I think it likely did play some part.

      1. Those are all very rare now, and I think that counts as an improvement to mankind. Is that simply a result of new philosophical ideals, or does Christianity deserve any part of the credit?

        Christendom’s history is just as bloody as anybody else’s.

      2. Slavery – Slavery before Christianity less horrible than slavery after Christianity. At that age, you became a slave due to losing a war or falling deeply into debt. Within your lifetime, you could earn your freedom back.
        In America, many people are thrown into prisons for falling into debt. In 19th century France, you could become a galley slave by being caught stealing bread or fruit from a tree (see: Les Miserables).
        And then throughout Europe, we enslaved people with “skin the colour of the devil.”
        Despite all that, I’m not saying that Christianity caused this. It was mostly economic reasons actually…

        Bloodsports: Nothing wrong with gladiator battles, as long as the contestants are willing. (Also, it is a common misconception that gladiator battles were fought to the death. Honorable fighters had their lives spared most of the time.)
        And under Christianity, there were duels by sword and by pistol. Jousting was very dangerous as well. And for a good chunk of Christian Europe’s history, war was practically a sport. Read the Song of Roland to get a Christian view on bloodshed.

        Infanticide: Won’t argue here. Caring monks encouraged people to leave their children up for adoption rather than kill them.

    2. For simple evolutionary reasons, I’d expect pretty much any religion still extant to have its share of psychologically salient ritual techniques. Any religion that couldn’t pull off a few mind hacks, through ritual, drugs, or both, would be absorbed/supplanted/exterminated by one that could. Even little flash-in-the-pan cults have their charismatic leaders, and any longer-lived religion has some psychological technique to last beyond the immediate influence of the leader. Like shamanic knowledge of what plants will give you a wacking great high, this body of technique is pre-scientific; but field tested.

      I have no problem with people, atheists or otherwise, playing with these techniques; but their use on prisoners would make me nervous. There is pretty much nothing more coercive than making somebody’s freedom contingent on adherence to some sectarian practice, and in an attitude of isolation from the broader society no less. Classic cult stuff, only state sponsored.

      As for the question of whether a “hindu right wing” is a contradiction in terms, or whether hinduism is a philosophy or a religion, or whatever, I find the notion of trying to infer the “true” nature of a sociological phenomenon rather pointless. A religion or “philosophy” is the body of how its adherents behave. Quibbling from theory or exegetical analysis of sacred texts is just a no true scotsman thing. In point of sociological fact, Hinduism has right wing extremists, who exhibit all the classic behaviors of right wing extremists anywhere. I don’t know whether this prison thing is connected to them or not; but they exist, and the fact that inoffensive “hinduism as philosophy” types exist as well does not refute them(anymore than the existence of wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly-gay-friendly-Unitarian-Universalists refutes the existence of Pat Robertson as a manifestation of Protestantism).

  4. You’re confusing yoga with religion – Indians don’t conflate the two AFAIK.

    Yoga is one of the six principal schools of Hindu philosophy. Hinduism is a religion to some people and a philosophy to others. What people in the US call yoga generally has very little to do with what people in India call yoga. Asana (poses) are the least part of it. The biggest subset of yoga is bhakti, or devotional yoga.

    Hindus don’t indoctrinate or evangelize, generally speaking.

    But they do enjoy burning down mosques and killing Muslims. India has some of the worst religious violence in the world, mostly at the hands of fanatic Hindu nationalists.

    1. They still don’t evangelize. How does your statement respond to that? The previous anonymous poster never mentioned a love for the fundamentalists.

  5. Wait, what?

    They teach people how to breathe fireballs and that works as a get-out-of-jail-free card? This is political correctness gone mad!

  6. People who practice yoga (asana) can tell you that, regardless of your philosophical or spiritual approach, yoga DOES work to calm the mind and balance the spirit. It seems like this can only be helpful to people with troubled thoughts and spirits. The discipline yoga requires and inspires will also serve these prisoners on the outside, to begin new, hopefully better lives.

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