Religion as a Framework among Incarcerated Women

• In Event: 600 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Incarceration

Abstract

How does religion impact the lives of incarcerated women? Previous debates suggest competing outcomes: religion either placates or politicizes the prison experience. To investigate the role of religious messages in shaping the carceral experience, I draw upon twelve months of ethnographic observations of religious and secular activities in a women’s prison, along with six months of observations of the daily lives of four recently released women. Further, I interview 25 formerly incarcerated women to describe the variety of religious trajectories post-release, highlighting the mechanisms that sustain religious frameworks over time and across settings. My findings point to religion as a placating resource, but further nuance this approach in ways unanticipated by prior literature. I find that religiosity motivates compliant behavior in prison using narratives of morality, compared to the legalistic narratives propagated by prison officials. Further, my results suggest that prisoners avoid total submission to secular authority by calling upon an agentic God as a tool of resistance, viewing Him as the ultimate judge who decides their fate above and beyond the warden. Understanding the role of religion in the lives of incarcerated women is particularly important given its potentially tremendous gravity as an organizing framework for some of the most disadvantaged Americans.

Author

• Rachel Ellis, University of Pennsylvania