“Spiritual Supervision”—the spillover of carceral control into the spiritual and religious lives of Latina/os in the San Francisco Bay Area

• In Event: Latina/o/x Criminology Panel 5: Altering, Documenting, and Resisting Carceral Practices: Policing, Gangs, and Schools

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic data collected in a Latina/o Pentecostal organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area, this paper examines how carceral control diffuses into the routines of ethnic religious organizations and street ministries targeting criminalized populations. Expanding scholarship on the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment and carceral supervision, I theorize that a new dimension of punishment that I call, spiritual supervision, emerges in this context. Spiritual supervision refers to the process of how street ministries interactionally manage and surveil the religious practices and actions of criminalized Latinas as a collateral consequence of incarceration. I show how spiritual supervision operates through the simultaneous recognition of two separate tracks of religious empowerment and disentitlement: one for economically-vulnerable criminalized women seeking refuge from drug dependency, sex work, and stigma, and another, for wealthier, and non-carceral members whose financial contributions to the church transform them into the spiritual saviors of criminalized church members. By documenting how spiritual supervision is enacted through the institutional practices of this street ministry, I show how carceral control generates “spiritual” forms of punishment that further racialized, gendered, and classed divides that complicate our understanding of religion, criminal stigma, re-entry, and how Latinas confront the complex collateral consequences of carceral control.

Author

• Melissa Guzman, San Francisco State University