For years, jails and prisons have been looking for ways to lower their health care costs. In addition, they have been looking for ways to reduce violence behind walls and reduce recidivism rates postrelease. Recently, criminological research has shined light on the use of alternative rehabilitation to help inmates cope with prison life, improve their overall health, and rehabilitate. Some of these techniques include yoga, mindfulness, and meditation. This article discusses the impact of these techniques in the criminal justice system, highlights the major findings, and identifies the gaps needed to be filled by future researchers.

While there is a growing body of research on parent-child visitation among the general carceral population, less attention has been paid to examining parent-child contact practices among parents with mental health illness diagnoses. The current study uses a sample from the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates to analyze the associations between mental health illness diagnosis and various modalities of parent-child contact. Multivariate analyses of types of mental health illness diagnoses on six parent-child contact modalities demonstrate heterogeneity where not all mental health diagnoses reduce all parent-child contacts. Furthermore, incarcerated parents with multiple mental health illnesses are less likely to experience most forms of contact including in-person visits, phone calls, and mail.

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Yoga has been making its way into juvenile detention centers, but little research has looked at the pos-sible effects of yoga on this special population of individuals. The purpose of this paper is to review the relevant literature available on the effects of yoga on youth involved with the justice system and its potential for rehabilitation. Notably, the objective here is to highlight the need for gender-specific pro-gramming, specifically those designed with women and girls in mind. This paper takes a gender-responsive and trauma-informed approach when discussing literature on alternative rehabilitation and, importantly, identifies the gaps in previous research while offering ways of improvement. The findings in this review highlight the need for trauma-informed care and gender-specific programming. Importantly, this review identifies the need for race-sensitive programming while addressing cultural, historical, and gender-based issues within the field of criminology and criminal justice. Overall, we find that gender-specific programs are useful but lack in implementation and program evaluation. With that said, more research is needed in this area of study.