The Reasons for Religious Involvement in the Correctional Environment

SUMMARY This paper discusses the reasons for inmate religious involvement in the correctional environment. Participant observation and seventy individual interviews were employed to gather the ethnographic data in two large maximum-security prisons located in the northeast United States. Content analysis and constant comparison methods were used to develop analytic categories and to compare results across research sites and between denominational groups. It was revealed that inmates practice religion for a variety of reasons depending on the sincerity of their intentions. The results introduce insight into why inmates practice religion in prison, provide valuable information for those who administer religious programs, and are shown to be theoretically linked with findings of prior research conducted in the correctional environment.