By Josefin Wikstrom, PYP Europe Program Director, Founder of Prison Yoga Project Scandinavia
A book created with incarcerated participants at Kumla Prison has held the number-one spot for nearly six months, and its message has now reached Swedish national television.
Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, we shared the story behind It’s an Inside Job, a book born from conversations with incarcerated participants at Kumla Prison in Sweden. Today, we’re excited to share an extraordinary update on just how far that book, and its message, has traveled.
What began as an idea inside Kumla Prison has now reached viewers across Sweden.
In August, It’s an Inside Job: Change from the Inside Out was featured on Efter fem, one of Sweden’s most-watched evening current affairs programs, when TV4 presented the books most frequently borrowed at Kumla, Sweden’s largest and best-known maximum-security prison. At the top of the list was It’s an Inside Job, a position the book has held for nearly six months.
The list was presented by Jens Lapidus, one of Sweden’s most prominent authors of novels about gang crime and the criminal underworld. Although none of his own books had made the list—a fact he noted with good humor—he praised the list as a whole for featuring books of exceptionally high quality. While he had not yet read It’s an Inside Job, he described the fact that a book about yoga, stress, and trauma held the number-one position as a very positive sign.
For those of us who created the book, that response captured something essential. It’s an Inside Job is not simply a yoga manual. It grew from the questions, experiences, and ideas of people living inside prison and from their wish to share something useful beyond the walls.
A Book That Began on the Inside
The idea emerged five years ago in the yoga groups at Kumla. Participants began saying to me, “Josefin, we should write a book. Put all our questions into a book.”
Those conversations became the starting point for a long collaborative process. The book was developed with participants in the yoga project at Kumla and in collaboration with Prison Yoga Project’s international programs. It brings together personal reflections, lived experiences, and stories from prisons in Sweden, the United States, and Mexico, as well as accounts from people whose lives have been deeply affected by trauma, violence, addiction, and incarceration.
Alongside these stories, the book offers accessible explanations of trauma and the nervous system, together with practical body-based tools for managing stress, anxiety, sleep difficulties, emotional overwhelm, and physical tension. It includes breathing practices, mindful movement, relaxation, and yoga sequences that can be used on their own or before and after other forms of physical training.
The practices were created for the realities of restricted and challenging environments, but their relevance extends far beyond prison. Stress, trauma, disconnection, and difficulty regulating emotions are not confined to correctional settings. The capacity to pause, notice what is happening internally, and make a different choice is valuable in every part of society.
The participants’ own message appears on the cover:
“We hope that you who read this book will receive as much help from these methods as we do here on the inside. We want to spread something positive into society, especially to children and young people, as a form of prevention.”
— Participants at Kumla Prison
A Title With a History of Its Own
The title It’s an Inside Job carries a story that reaches back even further.
In 2010, Francis Newberry, a former participant of Prison Yoga Project founder James Fox, gave James the words “It’s an Inside Job,” together with a piece of tattoo art, and invited him to use them however he wished. The phrase gave expression to a truth at the heart of this work: while support, opportunity, and community matter enormously, lasting change must also be cultivated from within.
More than fifteen years later, those words appeared on Swedish national television as the title of the most-borrowed book at Kumla. For James, seeing them there was deeply moving. The moment connected Francis’s original contribution with the voices of participants in Sweden and with a wider international community of people using yoga and embodied practices to support change from the inside out.
That history matters. The book was not produced about incarcerated people from a distance. It has been shaped by their questions, insights, creative contributions, and desire to help others. Its current success at Kumla therefore belongs, above all, to the participants whose experiences made it possible.
From Kumla to a Wider Audience
The television segment followed coverage by Dagens Juridik, Sweden’s leading legal affairs publication, which explored the reading list and the book’s purpose in greater detail. Together, the two stories have introduced the book and its message to an audience far beyond those who normally encounter prison-based yoga programs.
This attention comes at an important time for Prison Yoga Project Scandinavia, our nonprofit initiative working in the wider community. We are currently in the implementation phase of developing yoga programs to support people after release, as well as preventive programs for children and young people at risk. All proceeds from It’s an Inside Job go directly back into the organization and help us continue developing and implementing this work. Thanks to the income from the book, we are also able to provide copies free of charge to prisons, youth institutions, and other settings serving people who have been exposed to trauma and high levels of stress.
We are also delighted that the book is currently being translated into English, with translations into several other languages underway as well.
The first edition has sold out through bookstores, and a second printing is now underway.
Yet the most meaningful measure of the book’s impact is not the publicity or the sales. It is that a book born from conversations in yoga groups at Kumla has remained the prison’s most frequently borrowed title for nearly half a year. People on the inside are choosing to read it, use it, and pass its message forward.
We are profoundly grateful to the participants who trusted us with their experiences, to everyone across Prison Yoga Project’s international community who contributed to the book, and to the readers who are helping these stories travel. We also thank TV4, Efter fem, Dagens Juridik, and Jens Lapidus for drawing attention to a different kind of story from prison, one centered on self-awareness, human capacity, prevention, and hope.
Sometimes an idea that begins within prison walls can reach far beyond them. It’s an Inside Job is proof of that.
