Research

Faith in Imprisonment, my first book project, uses religion as a lens to examine the development of mass incarceration. Where existing scholarship about mass incarceration primarily focuses on race (and, to a lesser extent, class and gender), I show that religious ideas and organizations also profoundly shaped the development, structure, and experiences of incarceration in the latter half of the twentieth century. My scholarship draws on conducted archival research in the internal records of the Florida Department of Corrections and the Florida Parole Commission and thirteen months of ethnographic research in a state prison. Religion emerges as a key force in the adoption of parole, the embrace of halfway houses, and the inception of private prisons—fundamental transformations that expanded the criminal justice system’s capacity to supervise and incarcerate and drew its tentacles deeper into the fabric of daily American life. The two key contributions of the book as a whole are to emphasize the religiously-mediated connections between prisons and other social sites, and to demonstrate that mass incarceration depended on reforms—often promoted by religious organizations or motivated by religious ideologies—that grew and legitimated the carceral mechanisms of the U. S. state.

The book consist of three parts, abstracts of which are below. Also included are wordclouds of each section to provide an accessible viewpoint of the topics, themes, and theories discussed in each chapter. The wordclouds were created using Jonathan Feinberg’s javascript application Wordle.

Religion, Race, and Labor: The Making of "Productive Citizenship"

Chapter 1 traces the actions of prison and parole administrators during WWII, who declared that “no more important element enters into the proper rehabilitation of the individual than does religion.” I argue that war transformed America’s prison systems by creating demand for prisoners’ labor and blood, thereby spurring administrators to expand religious programs under the aegis of “rehabilitation” in an effort to release prisoners into the military or war industries. Read more here...

Privatization and Changing Economics

Section 2 combines oral history with data from the archives of ancillary institutions—religious organizations, probation offices, courts, and re-entry centers—to reveal the central role religious groups like the Salvation Army played in the privatization of prisons. As corrections administrators embraced a Christian ideology of rehabilitating the “whole person” in the 1970s, they outsourced key state functions to religious organizations. Though these arrangements began with benign intentions, they changed the economic underpinnings of imprisonment and paved the way for more exploitative private prison ventures. Read more here...

Work on the Self in a Total Institution

Faith in Imprisonment concludes with two chapters drawn from my ethnographic research in Wakulla Correctional Institution, a 3,600-bed public prison south of Tallahassee. These chapters amplify the perspectives of individual prisoners and ethnographically highlight the specific ways religion shapes the experience of being incarcerated. They contribute to the literature about prisons and analogous “total institutions” by disrupting the paradigms of surveillance and power/knowledge that characterize most of the salient scholarship. Read more here...