By Vanessa Vera Roman
The Daily Record
MORRIS COUNTY, N.J. — Nancy Candea checks into Morris County Jail every Thursday afternoon, makes her way through security and gets escorted past the women’s cafeteria into a multipurpose athletic room.
Dressed in black and barefoot, Candea, 49, pulls out a portable stereo and clicks on some tranquil music — the kind you’d hear in a Greenwich Village tea shop, not in a stuffy cinderblock gym.
Then, she slaps a worn pink yoga mat on the floor and waits as inmates Patricia, 47, and Stephanie, 21, shuffle into her weekly yoga class.
This class is about teaching these inmates to be tranquil, to find their “center,” to get to a place where they can think about their choices and be intentional about their future. And, hopefully, once they serve their sentence and leave, have the tools necessary so they never come back, Candea says.
“Yoga isn’t just about physical exercise, it’s about what’s going on in your mind,” said Candea, a certified yoga instructor from Rockaway Township who has been teaching the class at Morris County Jail for just over a month. “If we can help people get some skills so they can actually change how they process things ... people won’t be coming back (to jail) again. That helps society as a whole.”
Morris County Jail offers a variety of programs — from educational to athletic to religious — to the roughly 350 male and female inmates currently serving time, said Chief Frank Corrente, the jail’s undersheriff. But the yoga class is one of those “outside the box” programs currently being offered, he said.
Programs like the yoga class help keep inmates busy, Corrente said, and that’s important.
“My job is to rehabilitate,” he said. “The more idle time these people have on their hands, the more time they have to think of the wrong things instead of the right things.”
Stephanie finds it “chaotic” to be in jail, but she doesn’t feel that way in class.
“I always feel that for this hour I’m not in jail. It’s very peaceful,” she said. “Being in this class is a time for me to relax and meditate and to be out of the chaos.”
For Patricia, who said she is a Christian, being part of the yoga class helps her reconnect to her spirituality, she said.
“Obviously, I wasn’t connected (before) — that’s why I’m in jail,” she said.
For Candea, however, and other yoga practitioners, a yoga program in jail is about more than keeping busy; it’s a transformative tool.
Judith Hancox, 59, of East Hanover, is a licensed clinical social worker with a private counseling practice who specializes in trauma recovery.
She’s also a certified yoga and meditation teacher.
Jail is the perfect place to practice yoga, she said, “because it teaches you how to control your mind and it’s probably the most effective thing you can do to keep yourself alert and aware.”
Yoga, coupled with mental, emotional and spiritual support for inmates, can be a tool for healing,
Hancox said, and an opportunity for positive redirection.
Beyond yoga, however, inmates need programs that can expose them to positive influences, Hancox said.
“It strengthens them and gives them ... the support they need to not fall into the negative forces that are there – what got them there in the first place,” she said.
County jails and state prisons — which are not affiliated and run independently of each other — throughout the state offer a variety of programs beyond general education, English-as-a-second-language classes and equivilency diploma preparation, that are intended to keep inmates occupied, and, it’s hoped, facilitate rehabilitation.
The Middlesex County Department of Corrections and Youth Services in North Brunswick, which includes both adult and juvenile facilities, offers its juvenile population yoga classes that have received positive feedback, Ed Cicchi, warden of the Middlesex County Jail, said.
Previously, a yoga program had been started for the male inmates at the adult jail, but after a successful first week, the men were getting “peer pressure” from their cell mates about taking yoga and stopped attending, Cicchi said.
The program was dropped.
The men at Middlesex County Jail have found another outlet, however, in theater.
Through the jail’s education program, a teacher is working with the men on August Wilson’s play “Fences.”
Right now, the inmates perform among classmates, but, eventually, Cicci hopes they can arrange for an in-house performance.
At Monmouth County Jail in Freehold, inmates aren’t taking yoga, but through the sports program have the opportunity to take Zumba – an aerobic exercise program based on Latin and ethnic dance, said Cynthia Scott, spokeswoman for the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office.
Motivational speakers have also come to speak to inmates at Monmouth County Jail, and musical concerts have been brought to the inmates as well.
Both Cicci, and Corrente, of Morris County, said such inmate programs at the county level are not funded by taxpayer dollars, but by profits from inmate commissary funds or inmate purchases.
“The taxpayer doesn’t pay for it,” Corrente said.
For Cicci, more programs means fewer problems for inmates.
“We’re firm believers that education is the tool to keep people out of here,” he said.
“We’re not spending taxpayer’s dollars to fund these things, but we’re also trying to keep people out of here, and, in some ways, trying to save the taxpayer dollars that way,” he said.
Inmates at several of New Jersey’s state prisons have unique opportunities to work with animals while serving time.
Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton offers the Puppies Behind Bars program, where inmates raise dogs that will eventually become bomb-sniffing dogs.
Copyright Daily Record 2011. Reprinted with permission.