Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade Review"This book is highly valuable as an experience that helps readers build a mental schema of some of the women inmates’ realities of incarceration." * Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work *
"Ellis’ piercing study, beautifully written, vividly demonstrates the double-edged sword of religion in prison – its capacity to liberate and its equal power to subjugate."
* Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *
"Ellis’ contributions are significant to a plethora of academic fields, while her writing style is easily digestible as she recalls the lived experiences of the women at Mapleside Prison." * Gender and Society *
"Ellis develops three-dimensional, nuanced portrayals of the interiority of women’s lives, recognizing women’s full and complex humanity in ways neither the carceral nor religious discourses that are the object of her study do. Ellis is an exceptionally skilled, ethical, and transparent ethnographer. Her methodological appendix should be required reading in sociological research methods classes." * Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion *
Table of ContentsContents
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
