ABSTRACT The history of the modern prison as an institution founded upon Christian—specifically, Quaker and Calvinist—ideals is well‐documented among scholars of US history, religion, and carcerality. Since its inception, the American prison has been depicted as a prominent site of religious formation and conversion, not only by religious leaders and religious studies scholars, but also by secular researchers, prison authorities, and many incarcerated people themselves. In tracing the development of the US prison over the last 200+ years, it is difficult to overstate the importance of religious ideologies, practices, and communities and their enduring influence on the disciplinary and rehabilitative projects shaping the carceral apparatus today. This article engages the prison as a site that holds contemporary religious significance. Beginning with a brief survey of historical scholarship examining the prison's religious past, it then turns to work by sociologists, legal scholars, religion scholars, theologians, and ethicists to consider how the (always ambiguous, persistently negotiated) category of religion continues to take shape in and through US prisons. This includes scholarship exploring lived experiences of religious worship, belief, ritual, and community‐building among the incarcerated, as well as work analyzing contemporary incarceration as a religious practice in itself. The article then examines several recent texts that engage religious practice and thought as resources in the ongoing work of carceral critique and abolition, and it ends with a consideration of potential future directions in the study of religion and prisons. This article shows that religion still plays a substantial role in the work of the US prison and many who study it, as an influence that is simultaneously continuous and highly mutable; it also demonstrates the importance of the prison to contemporary studies of American religion, showing how present‐day concerns like mass incarceration, racist sentencing practices, or solitary confinement are intimately linked to religious commitments, rituals, and communities. Following the lead of multiple interdisciplinary scholars of religion and carcerality, it demonstrates the capaciousness of both of these categories—religion and the prison—as sites of critical inquiry that cannot be analyzed in isolation, or shackled to a particular place or time.
Laura Simpson (Sun,) studied this question.