Yoga instructor Cathy Manuel teaches prison inmates to stretch, hold poses and control their breathing – ways in which to calm themselves and find their own sense of “empowerment.” It is a striving to find inner peace — and, for some, to let go of anger.
Manuel, a 52-year-old hailing from Moncton, N.B., is executive director of Freeing the Human Spirit, an organization promoting the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of inmates in Canada’s prison system.
Cathy Manuel, Freeing the Human Spirit
According to the organization’s website, it currently has a stable of 36 volunteer instructors and, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, had served 10 prisons.
Generally, the physical and mental benefits of yoga are widely known. But Manuel, a former social worker and probation officer, says the activity can be particularly helpful in the prison setting when it comes to battling anxiety and depression — both of which are commonly linked to doing time.
It can lead to better sleep, better “regulation” and, interestingly, a “sense of empowerment,” Manuel told Law360 Canada.
She said the prison yoga sessions use Asanas, which focus on “physical postures” that help calm the mind, and Pranayama, a meditative form of breathing techniques.
“Sometimes we don’t have control over our environment, and definitely prisoners don’t have control over their external environment. They only have control over their internal environment — their body, their thoughts — and yoga is a way to help them gain control over that internal environment — whether that’s depression, whether that’s anger. And it’s done … through various postures [and] the practice of meditation or breathwork.”
Of course, the sessions done in prisons differ greatly from those in a typical yoga studio, she said.
“At times, our intention may be to teach a yoga and meditation class for 60 to 90 minutes. However, due to the nature of the institutions, time gets eroded and classes must be modified. Some aspects, such as concentration, naturally pose challenges due to the loud, harshly lit and noisy environment. Consequently, inmates must exert extra effort to maintain focus on their breath, body, and movements compared to those practising in a serene studio setting."
Yoga, she said, could help in the rehabilitative process. Apropos of this, one of Manuel’s philosophies is that people, including many inmates, are redeemable. She learned this lesson from her late mother, Jane, a pious member of the Baptist Church who at one point served as a prison nurse with the Victorian Order of Nurses.
“I think my mother was a fighter for the underdog,” said Manuel. “My mom would always try and find the good in people. … She knew everybody had their own demons, and that everybody was fighting a battle she didn’t necessarily know or understand.”
Former inmate David Dorson — not his real name — served 15 months of a three-year sentence in a federal prison. As his sentence approached, Dorson, a first-time offender, began practising yoga at home as a way of girding himself for the road ahead.
Dorson, who describes himself as now being “retirement age,” and who occasionally writes for this publication under that pen name, said yoga helped him get through his initial time inside, when he was placed in segregation while awaiting transfer to a federal pen.
Forced to strike poses on a concrete floor, at times with little more than a towel under him, Dorson used yoga to battle boredom and loneliness.
“When you’re in segregation, you’re basically on your own 24 hours a day. You don’t talk to another person for days on end. … You have to build something to get through the days because you’re not allowed to have most of the things that most of us would use to get through the days. There’s no radio, there’s no TV, there [are] hardly any books, there’s hardly any writing material, and there is nowhere to go and nobody to see. … The task is to build some kind of daily routine so the days pass without you just sitting there and driving yourself crazy.”
It was after Dorson was transferred to a minimum-security prison that he joined guided yoga classes. Sometimes, he says, prison staff were not too co-operative when it came to the sessions. He at least partially chalks this up to the philosophy that prison should be a perpetually miserable place for all inmates — regardless of their crime.
To this, he says more consideration needs to be made around improving the inmate for when they are released back into society.
“If you’re going to keep some people locked up for long periods of time, like years and years, you have to do that in a way that allows people to live, and the way we run the system is we start with the worst case scenario.”
Dorson is talking about the thought amongst some prison staff that all inmates should be treated with the same level of punishment and suspicion.
“Working in a prison is a horrible job; your full-time job is to keep people locked up and to essentially make them unhappy. Because we have this worst-case scenario approach, everything is a matter of suspicion: What’s the worst that can happen here? So, if you’re a staff [member], you’re trained to think that way – ‘Is this person trying to put one over on me? Do they have some kind of plan here that I don’t understand? What’s the worst assumption I could make about their motivations and start with that.’”
This, he said, negates any desire to “create anything positive” for inmates aiming to rehabilitate.
Dalhousie University law professor Adelina Iftene, an expert in prison law, spoke of the benefits such programs such as this have for inmates.
“Any kind of community activity that comes into a prison is extremely helpful,” she said. “Whether it’s yoga, whether it’s any other thing that’s physical, whether it’s a book club, there’s mountains of evidence showing that the connections incarcerated people manage to keep or create … with individuals who are not incarcerated are probably the most significant things that will help them rehabilitate and reintegrate successfully after they are released.”
She said yoga classes would be particularly beneficial for aging inmates.
According to Iftene, 25 per cent of federally incarcerated people are north of 50 – which she said “is considered old” in the prison system due to impacts of the environment on people.
“The age of 50 is considered to be the equivalent of 65 in the community, so a significant portion [of the prison] population has aging bodies and physical limitations. And they are in significant physical and mental decline as well due to the circumstances of incarceration. … So, these people are facing a lot of additional stress.”
Comment from Correctional Service Canada was not received by press time.
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