“Research has shown that yoga offers great benefits for relieving stress and anxiety, something that is of great value for anyone living or working in a prison environment,” said James Fox, founder and director of the Prison Yoga Project.
Fox earned the credential as a yoga instructor in 2000. Deciding to bring the practice to people beyond the yoga studio, he has taught a bi-weekly class at San Quentin State Prison for 12 years.
Fox’s dedication has turned his class into something bigger: the Prison Yoga Project, an acclaimed and widely replicated model for bringing yoga into prisons around the country. “I’ve trained more than 800 yoga instructors who go teaching in institutions in different states,” Fox said.
“In 2012, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency assessed results of a small study of San Quentin prison projects, among them Fox’s,” reported The Yoga Journal. It found that inmates were calmer and had better emotional control and anger management after taking his class.
“It also concluded that such course offerings were ‘promising rehabilitation tools’ that could reduce recidivism, a welcome validation that is helping Fox expand the reach of the Prison Yoga Project,” continued the Yoga Journal.
Among Fox’s yoga instructor trainees is a Canadian provincial investigator, Chantele Theroux, who came across a photograph of inmates doing yoga at San Quentin and was inspired. She later sought Fox’s training and traveled to San Quentin to check out his program.
“Because they’ve learned how to breathe and calm themselves down and not just react in the face of challenge and ego, there’s less violence. You can feel it,” Theroux said. “Not once did I feel intimidated, scared, worried, concerned for my safety.”
Theroux later spoke for prison yoga programs at a conference of the Canadian Criminal Justice Association.
Fox has even helped establish prison yoga programs in Norway, Germany and the Netherlands.
“What kind of person do you want returning to society?” Fox asks. “If you don’t offer prisoners these types of programs, they’re not going to improve. They are only going to get worse.
“What kind of person do you want to run into at the grocery store?” he asked rhetorically.
