In This Place Called Prison: Women's Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment

by Rachel Ellis

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520384545
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	699,338
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rachel Ellis is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.

Table of 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

Editorial Reviews

"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

"This is an excellent book that is easily accessible, thought provoking, and sheds light on an important, but under studied, topic."

Review of Religious Research

"Ellis is a skilled and empathetic ethnographer. . .The women about whom she writes are complex people navigating a world of very limited choices."
 

Law & Society Review

"Ellis switches brilliantly between major structural analysis that contextualizes and personal stories that tell the cases of particular women. She is indeed interested most of all in the personal transformation that incarcerated women undergo and in the role that religion can play here."

Journal of Contemporary Religion

"By showing how religion in prison is both a resource and a power, as well as a source of power and control, Ellis makes an original and relevant contribution to debates in the sociology of religion and prison sociology."

Sociology of Religion

"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

"This book is a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary study of the law, and it would make a powerful contribution to conversations in sociology, philosophy, ethics, political science, religion, and gender studies classrooms—as well as to scholarly research agendas."

Culture and the Humanities Law

"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

"Accessible and well-written, In This Place Called Prison will engage not only students of sociology and carceral studies, but scholars of lived religion, gender and sexuality, and political theology, as well."

Political Theology Journal