Full Description
In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid account of religious life within an institution designed to punish. Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women's prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis shows how women draw on religion to navigate lived experiences of carceral control. A trenchant study of religion colliding and colluding with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and constraint, this book speaks to the quest for dignity and light against the backdrop of mass incarceration, state surveillance, and American inequality.
Contents
Contents
Introduction
1. Thou Shalt Not: A Day in Prison
2. Let There Be Light: Religious Life Behind Bars
3. The Lord Is My Shepherd: Protestant Messages
of God's Redemptive Plan
4. Blessed Is The Fruit Of Thy Womb: Gender,
Religion, and Ideologies of the Family
5. For Many Are Called, But Few Are Chosen:
Status and Dignity in the Prison Church
Conclusion
Epilogue: Out of the House of Bondage
Acknowledgments
Methodological Appendix
Notes
References
Index
