Redeeming Imprisonment: Religion and the Development of Mass Incarceration in Florida

Abstract

Redeeming Imprisonment demonstrates how religious ideas and organizations shaped the development, structure, and experiences of mass incarceration in the United States since World War II. It traces the expansion of Florida’s prison system from an archipelago of small labor camps at the outset of WWII into one of the largest criminal justice systems in the world to show how religious ideas and organizations legitimated and, at key moments, expanded the state’s capacities to supervise and incarcerate. Redeeming Imprisonment analytically centers religion while examining how its intersections with class, gender, and especially race shaped Florida’s prison system. Religious interventions in the criminal justice system undergirded rehabilitative ideologies, stabilized prisons during moments of crisis, and expanded the involvement of private organizations in probation and incarceration. 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 and propelled its tentacles deeper into the fabric of daily American life.

Redeeming Imprisonment draws on the analysis of never-before-accessed internal records of the Florida Department of Corrections and the Florida Parole Commission as well as thirteen months of ethnographic research in a state prison. Part I demonstrates the that incarceration is productive of citizenship. In Florida, war transformed America’s prison systems by creating demand for prisoners’ labor and blood. As officials sought to transform prisoners into “useful citizens,” they expanded religious programs under the aegis of “rehabilitation” because they believed that “no more important element enters into the proper rehabilitation of the individual than does religion.” Racial disparities in religious programming reveal entanglements of religious and racial citizenship. Part I also examines the perspectives of prisoners and their families, closely analyzing letters they wrote to authorities asking for relief. Prisoners’ articulations of “productive citizenship” reflected the state’s concerns with religious observance and male breadwinning.

Part II combines oral history with data from the archives of ancillary institutions to reveal the central role of the Salvation Army and other groups 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. The Salvation Army of Florida took control of misdemeanor probation during the 1970’s and their embrace of “offender fees” reshaped the economic incentives of the criminal justice system. Contemporaneously, the protests and lawsuits of black prisoners wrought changes in the politics of religious pluralism, partially dislodging white Protestantism from its hegemonic position within Florida prisons. Many of these Christian networks reinvented themselves as private, voluntary organizations. Over the course of the 1980s, some of these organizations became deeply implicated in a privatized criminal justice industry.

Redeeming Imprisonment concludes with an ethnographic analysis of daily life in a 3,600-bed public prison in North Florida. Part III traces parallels and asymmetries between religious conversion and rehabilitation and shows how confinement creates conditions that encourage religious conversion and observance. By bringing the micro-interactions of penitentiary life to light, these chapters disrupt the paradigms of surveillance and power/knowledge that characterize most scholarship about prisons and provide an ethnographic account of how religion shapes daily life in an American prison.