Bodies in Prison?
In anticipation of next week's conversation on Foucault's Birth of the Prison (in Phaedra's class), I thought we could discuss alternatives to the treatment of and attitudes around prisoners' bodies. One example might be meditation courses that are offered in prisons, such as the Vipassana Meditation Center in the Tihar high-security jail in New Delhi which has their own meditation center within the prison. The security guards are also required to take a meditation course prior to the course being available to inmates. http://www.dhamma.org/prisons.htm offers examples of successful meditation courses for both in-mates and security guards (and police cadets!) in India and world-wide.
The photo above is from the documentary "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana;" this is one of the many inmates who cried in the arms of the head security guard and meditation assistant instructor upon completion of a ten day sit.
The following excerpts are from http://www.dhamma.org/jaipur.htm, and raises the specific issue of what to do with prisoner's bodies (should they be chained while in meditation?). This describes a struggle that took place in 1975 when meditation was first introduced in an Indian prison. For what it's worth, there are no armed guards watching meditation students in the prisons today!
{FYI Goenka Ji is responsible for bringing Vipassana meditation teachings to India and world-wide from Burma; "dhamma" can be loosely translated as 'teachings'}:
...leg irons and handcuffs were used for hardened criminals. Four such prisoners were brought into the meditation hall locked in these fetters. Mr. Goenka was walking nearby and when he saw this... He exclaimed: "How can people in chains be put before me to meditate? This cannot happen. Remove the chains!"
But the Inspector General of Prisons (IG) said that this could not be allowed; the security in the jail was his responsibility; he could not remove the leg irons or the handcuffs. However, Mr Goenka was firm. He said he could not teach Dhamma with people sitting before him in chains. He was giving Dhamma; he had come to remove the chains. The IG told him he could remove the chains from within, but not the outside chains! Mr. Goenka insisted that those who were meditating must not be in chains...
The IG... said any one of them might try to be a hero, and strangle Mr. Goenka or me to death in the snap of a finger. We discussed the problem and finally came to an agreement to remove the chains and fetters. An armed guard would be posted at a strategic point to shoot any prisoner who started to advance menacingly. I told the IG to ensure that no panic shooting took place.
The chains and locks were removed... The course started. I sat at the front... My eyes were fixed on that armed guard, my heart throbbing and deep anxiety within! But with every passing moment came more relief... The red-hot eyes of the criminals who were the cause of so much turmoil changed and their faces beamed. Tears streamed down their cheeks...
posted by Anonymous at 11:05 PM
3 Comments:
Provocative post, Shira. The US is obsessed with placing bodies in prison, particularly Black males.
As “prisonsucks.com” notes: “On December 31, 2004, there were 2,135,901 people in U.S. prisons and jails. The United States incarcerates a greater share of its population, 724 per 100,000 residents, than any other country on the planet. But when you break down the statistics you see that incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment. …If you look at males aged 25-29 and by race, you can see what is going on even clearer, June 30, 2004:
* For White males ages 25-29: 1,666 per 100,000.
* For Latino males ages 25-29: 3,606 per 100,000.
* For Black males ages 25-29: 12,603 per 100,000. (That's 12.6% of Black men in their late 20s.)
Or you can make some international comparisons: South Africa under Apartheid was internationally condemned as a racist society.
* South Africa under apartheid (1993), Black males: 851 per 100,000
* U.S. under George Bush (2004), Black males: 4,919 per 100,000
What does it mean that the leader of the "free world" locks up its Black males at a rate 5.8 times higher than the most openly racist country in the world?”
My second response is from the Sept 1 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the latest example of hating body studies; this time, in the name of Foucault. There, Prof. Richard Wolin pits bodies studies (as identity-based scholarship) versus scholars invested in human rights:
"That would mean abandoning the fashionable preoccupation with "body politics" — the obsessive concern with a "different economy of bodies and pleasures" as a mode of transgression — and, following the later Foucault, according the claims of humanism their due."
Why do folks insist on dividing us like this?
Thanks for your thoughts, Phaedra. Indeed, issues of race and imprisonment - particularly in contemporary US - are deeply disturbing. The intersections between racial bodies, confinement/surveillance and meditation may perhaps be illustrated in the following article "Freedom Behind Bars" which describes (and depicts - there are photos) meditation at a maximum-security prison in Alabama.
http://www.lionheart.org/prison_proj/vipassana.html
[note the panoptican, interspersed between images of African American inmates meditating].
A description of this particular prison from http://www.prison.dhamma.org/ussummary.htm informs that the W.E. Donaldson state prison is the highest sexurity-level prison in Alabama, houses a death row, and "has a history of being Alabama's most violent and brutal prisons. Once known as the West Jefferson State Prison, it is now named after a correctional officer who was stabbed to death a number of years back. Approximately half of the 20 inmates taking the course were under a life sentence, some with the possibility of parole, others without hope of parole." (I wonder how many, if any, were on death row?)
West Gym reporting... 20 inmates, all meditating!
As promised in my seminar, here is the link for the article about teaching gender in a prison:
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=rhfb9185l9dzypjzkswh7bk69nx1yp7q
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