‘A New You’: Spiritual Supervision in the Lives of Criminalized Latina/os

• In Event: 4254 - Intersectional Inequalities

Abstract

While recent studies have examined how criminalized people experience state violence via institutions operating outside the formal criminal justice apparatus, we know little about how the role of religious organizations in the replication of carceral discourses. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I show how a Latina/o Evangelical Christian institution produces a new form of punishment I call spiritual supervision. This institution provides spiritual and material assistance to former gang members, sex workers, and prison inmates. However, as a necessary condition for receiving rehabilitative services, ex-incarcerated Latina/os must publicly perform their spiritual salvation through framing their criminal pasts as depraved. I advance the original concept of spiritual supervision to demonstrate how religious institutions reproduce their own discourses of carceral control—under the guise of empowerment and spiritual redemption. Through spiritual supervision, this Evangelical institution constructs two separate tracks of spiritual empowerment: one for economically-vulnerable recruits seeking refuge from street life and another, for wealthier members whose financial contributions to the church transform them into the spiritual saviors of criminalized church members. My findings reveal how classed and gendered hierarchies enable new forms of control and punishment for criminalized individuals. Finally, this analysis provides a novel way to examine how religious spaces become punitive contexts where ex-incarcerated Latina/os are spiritually supervised and further stigmatized.

Author

• Melissa Guzman, San Francisco State University