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God in Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison Ministries in the Age of Mass Incarceration
An eye-opening account of how and why evangelical Christian ministries are flourishing in prisons across the United States
It is by now well known that the United States’ incarceration rate is the highest in the world. What is not broadly understood is how cash-strapped and overcrowded state and federal prisons are increasingly relying on religious organizations to provide educational and mental health services and to help maintain order. And these religious organizations are overwhelmingly run by nondenominational Protestant Christians who see prisoners as captive audiences.
Some twenty thousand of these Evangelical Christian volunteers now run educational programs in over three hundred US prisons, jails, and detention centers. Prison seminary programs are flourishing in states as diverse as Texas and Tennessee, California and Illinois, and almost half of the federal prisons operate or are developing faith-based residential programs. Tanya Erzen gained inside access to many of these programs, spending time with prisoners, wardens, and members of faith-based ministries in six states, at both male and female penitentiaries, to better understand both the nature of these ministries and their effects. What she discovered raises questions about how these ministries and the people who live in prison grapple with the meaning of punishment and redemption, as well as what legal and ethical issues emerge when conservative Christians are the main and sometimes only outside forces in a prison system that no longer offers even the pretense of rehabilitation. Yet Erzen also shows how prison ministries make undeniably positive impacts on the lives of many men and women who have no hope of ever leaving prison can achieve personal growth, a sense of community, and a degree of liberation within the confines of their cells.
With both empathy and a critical eye, God in Captivity grapples with the questions of how faith-based programs serve the punitive regime of the prison, becoming a method of control behind bars even as prisoners use them as a lifeline for self-transformation and dignity.
It is by now well known that the United States’ incarceration rate is the highest in the world. What is not broadly understood is how cash-strapped and overcrowded state and federal prisons are increasingly relying on religious organizations to provide educational and mental health services and to help maintain order. And these religious organizations are overwhelmingly run by nondenominational Protestant Christians who see prisoners as captive audiences.
Some twenty thousand of these Evangelical Christian volunteers now run educational programs in over three hundred US prisons, jails, and detention centers. Prison seminary programs are flourishing in states as diverse as Texas and Tennessee, California and Illinois, and almost half of the federal prisons operate or are developing faith-based residential programs. Tanya Erzen gained inside access to many of these programs, spending time with prisoners, wardens, and members of faith-based ministries in six states, at both male and female penitentiaries, to better understand both the nature of these ministries and their effects. What she discovered raises questions about how these ministries and the people who live in prison grapple with the meaning of punishment and redemption, as well as what legal and ethical issues emerge when conservative Christians are the main and sometimes only outside forces in a prison system that no longer offers even the pretense of rehabilitation. Yet Erzen also shows how prison ministries make undeniably positive impacts on the lives of many men and women who have no hope of ever leaving prison can achieve personal growth, a sense of community, and a degree of liberation within the confines of their cells.
With both empathy and a critical eye, God in Captivity grapples with the questions of how faith-based programs serve the punitive regime of the prison, becoming a method of control behind bars even as prisoners use them as a lifeline for self-transformation and dignity.
- GenresReligionNonfiction
248 pages, Paperback
Published March 6, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 8, 2017
Summary: Explores the role that faith-based, predominantly Evangelical ministries are playing in the U.S. prison system, the hope they offer inmates, and the ways they may reinforce the efforts toward control and maintenance of a retributive justice and prison system.
Tanya Erzen is a university professor at the University of Puget Sound who teaches and is associate director of Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a non-profit organization providing a college education for incarcerated women. Thus she is more than a casual observer of the prison system in the U.S. In this book, she explores the role faith-based prison ministries and seminaries are playing in the U.S. prison system. Beyond the reports of the personal life change these ministries effect, Erzen asks questions about the role these ministries play in maintaining an existing system focusing more on retribution than restoration, and the inordinate presence evangelical Protestant groups in comparison to that of other religious faiths.
On one hand Erzen writes,
"For a woman facing life without the possibility of freedom or a long or even a short sentence, faith-based ministries can be a resource, a practice, a belief system, a sense of authority, and a space of belonging.
Yet she also notes an important question prison reform activist Norris Henderson suggested she ask faith-based ministries: "Why are you here?" Often these ministries are only concerned with saving individual souls without asking why those souls are in prison in the first place. She outlines the questions this raised for her:
"Some of the key questions I explore throughout God in Captivity are how faith-based ministries and the people who live in prison grapple with the meaning of punishment and redemption, and how their daily lives reflect Norris's question of why the ministry is there and why the prison is there--to punish indefinitely or to reform? How faith-based ministries conceive of punishment and forgiveness as inextricable thus remains a central concern of the book. Another urgent question that emerges is around the legal and ethical issue of predominantly conservative evangelical Christians as the main force inside prisons, and the implications for prisoners of other religions, particularly Muslims."
Erzen approaches this study through a collection of personal narratives and commentary. She listened to the stories of women and men in prison involved with these ministries, volunteer and ministry leaders, and prison officials. Much of her study was in southern states with the toughest sentencing laws and many prisoners faced either lengthy sentences without parole or life sentences. She also chronicles the rise of faith-based ministries and education programs as prisons expanded with mandatory sentencing laws, and other education programs were curtailed with funding cuts. She gives the many sides of a complex picture--from lives changed where people converted become internal missionaries to others, where those of other faiths sometimes enter Christian programs because of preferences given these prisoners, and where wardens consciously support these programs because they help control the behavior of inmates.
Perhaps the most significant questions she asks have to do with the structural issues of incarceration in this country that the personal focus of these ministries often fail to address. She notes how at times these ministries have been forces for reform, usually conservative reforms, and comes back to the question of the "why" of prisons--are they solely places of retribution and not places of forgiveness and restoration.
I read this book as an evangelical Christian who has friends (including university professors) engaged in some of the ministries she profiles and I have several responses to what she writes. One is appreciation for the structural questions she raises often overlooked in the very individualized approaches that characterize much of evangelicalism. The same "blind spot" hinders conversations about race, economic justice, the environment and other social issues where the faith response is often only personal moral behavior and personal relationships. Such blindness in the nineteenth century helped sustain the "peculiar institution" of slavery.
A second response however is that often the reverse is true in more socially progressive circles, where structures of injustice are addressed without addressing the question of how personal transformation and redemption might be experienced. What is striking is that faith-based ministries mobilize massive numbers of volunteers (the book mentions 20,000 plus) coming alongside prisoners, simply because their faith calls them to "remember those in prison" (Hebrews 13:3). While Erzen notes how significant this personal contact can be, I don't think she adequately credits what an extraordinary phenomenon this is--that working people give up evenings and weekends to "go to prison."
Erzen notes the disparity between evangelical groups and other religions and seems to consider this unjust. I would ask why aren't these other faiths or worldviews mobilizing similar numbers to care for their prisoners? If there is institutional privileging of Christians, that's one thing and this is unconstitutional, but Erzen doesn't mention adherents of other faiths wanting to offer similar programming systematically being turned away. Rather, the problem seems to be simply not enough people to go around, and that problem should not be laid at the feet of Evangelical Christians.
I raise this because there could be an undertone to this book, or in the reading of it by many that engenders suspicion of faith-based ministries. I actually don't think that is what Erzen wants, but rather to provoke a wider conversation between those engaged in such ministries and others concerned about prison reform. The truth is that we need to care both for people as individuals, and for the systems and structures that shape their lives. To ignore either is to care too little. Our incarceration rates are the highest in the world, our prisons are overcrowded, and our system of justice seems to be creating a permanent underclass where prison is part of the life cycle. The challenges are great enough that here, as elsewhere, all those of good will are needed if change for the better is to occur.
____________________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
Tanya Erzen is a university professor at the University of Puget Sound who teaches and is associate director of Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a non-profit organization providing a college education for incarcerated women. Thus she is more than a casual observer of the prison system in the U.S. In this book, she explores the role faith-based prison ministries and seminaries are playing in the U.S. prison system. Beyond the reports of the personal life change these ministries effect, Erzen asks questions about the role these ministries play in maintaining an existing system focusing more on retribution than restoration, and the inordinate presence evangelical Protestant groups in comparison to that of other religious faiths.
On one hand Erzen writes,
"For a woman facing life without the possibility of freedom or a long or even a short sentence, faith-based ministries can be a resource, a practice, a belief system, a sense of authority, and a space of belonging.
Yet she also notes an important question prison reform activist Norris Henderson suggested she ask faith-based ministries: "Why are you here?" Often these ministries are only concerned with saving individual souls without asking why those souls are in prison in the first place. She outlines the questions this raised for her:
"Some of the key questions I explore throughout God in Captivity are how faith-based ministries and the people who live in prison grapple with the meaning of punishment and redemption, and how their daily lives reflect Norris's question of why the ministry is there and why the prison is there--to punish indefinitely or to reform? How faith-based ministries conceive of punishment and forgiveness as inextricable thus remains a central concern of the book. Another urgent question that emerges is around the legal and ethical issue of predominantly conservative evangelical Christians as the main force inside prisons, and the implications for prisoners of other religions, particularly Muslims."
Erzen approaches this study through a collection of personal narratives and commentary. She listened to the stories of women and men in prison involved with these ministries, volunteer and ministry leaders, and prison officials. Much of her study was in southern states with the toughest sentencing laws and many prisoners faced either lengthy sentences without parole or life sentences. She also chronicles the rise of faith-based ministries and education programs as prisons expanded with mandatory sentencing laws, and other education programs were curtailed with funding cuts. She gives the many sides of a complex picture--from lives changed where people converted become internal missionaries to others, where those of other faiths sometimes enter Christian programs because of preferences given these prisoners, and where wardens consciously support these programs because they help control the behavior of inmates.
Perhaps the most significant questions she asks have to do with the structural issues of incarceration in this country that the personal focus of these ministries often fail to address. She notes how at times these ministries have been forces for reform, usually conservative reforms, and comes back to the question of the "why" of prisons--are they solely places of retribution and not places of forgiveness and restoration.
I read this book as an evangelical Christian who has friends (including university professors) engaged in some of the ministries she profiles and I have several responses to what she writes. One is appreciation for the structural questions she raises often overlooked in the very individualized approaches that characterize much of evangelicalism. The same "blind spot" hinders conversations about race, economic justice, the environment and other social issues where the faith response is often only personal moral behavior and personal relationships. Such blindness in the nineteenth century helped sustain the "peculiar institution" of slavery.
A second response however is that often the reverse is true in more socially progressive circles, where structures of injustice are addressed without addressing the question of how personal transformation and redemption might be experienced. What is striking is that faith-based ministries mobilize massive numbers of volunteers (the book mentions 20,000 plus) coming alongside prisoners, simply because their faith calls them to "remember those in prison" (Hebrews 13:3). While Erzen notes how significant this personal contact can be, I don't think she adequately credits what an extraordinary phenomenon this is--that working people give up evenings and weekends to "go to prison."
Erzen notes the disparity between evangelical groups and other religions and seems to consider this unjust. I would ask why aren't these other faiths or worldviews mobilizing similar numbers to care for their prisoners? If there is institutional privileging of Christians, that's one thing and this is unconstitutional, but Erzen doesn't mention adherents of other faiths wanting to offer similar programming systematically being turned away. Rather, the problem seems to be simply not enough people to go around, and that problem should not be laid at the feet of Evangelical Christians.
I raise this because there could be an undertone to this book, or in the reading of it by many that engenders suspicion of faith-based ministries. I actually don't think that is what Erzen wants, but rather to provoke a wider conversation between those engaged in such ministries and others concerned about prison reform. The truth is that we need to care both for people as individuals, and for the systems and structures that shape their lives. To ignore either is to care too little. Our incarceration rates are the highest in the world, our prisons are overcrowded, and our system of justice seems to be creating a permanent underclass where prison is part of the life cycle. The challenges are great enough that here, as elsewhere, all those of good will are needed if change for the better is to occur.
____________________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
June 6, 2017
Read this because a review copy was sent to me at work at a newspaper in Louisiana. Louisiana prisons are featured heavily in it.
I had some issues with the book. The author called the prisoners who had earned privileges trustee. The word is trusty. Also when talking about The prison at Angola, she mentions the former warden talking about the Baptist seminary being the reason for few fences. The terrain that surrounds it is never mentioned. Basically it is impossible to escape the area because of the surroundings.
Beyond that, the author brings up great things to think about. Is it fair that the religion allowed in prison in evangelical Christianity? Is the transformation real? Is the help to families what is needed? Why can't the freedom of religion translate into real freedom but then when it does, it flies against constitutional issues?
I had some issues with the book. The author called the prisoners who had earned privileges trustee. The word is trusty. Also when talking about The prison at Angola, she mentions the former warden talking about the Baptist seminary being the reason for few fences. The terrain that surrounds it is never mentioned. Basically it is impossible to escape the area because of the surroundings.
Beyond that, the author brings up great things to think about. Is it fair that the religion allowed in prison in evangelical Christianity? Is the transformation real? Is the help to families what is needed? Why can't the freedom of religion translate into real freedom but then when it does, it flies against constitutional issues?
July 14, 2017
I've always been interested in criminal justice, so there was a lot to interest me in this book. As the title implies, it mainly focuses on the ethical quandaries of having religious programs become so prevalent in prisons: as cash-strapped states cut budges for mental health care, education, and addiction programs in prison, religious volunteer programs step in to fill the gap. On the one hand, at least there is a chance for prisoners to receive the help they need. On the other hand, when programs are explicitly Christian and often insist that prisoners become Christian to participate, how much help is genuinely being provided? When these programs give participants safer conditions and a greater likelihood of parole, is there really freedom of religion in prison? (Freedom of religion is a large concern: Erzen writes about some of the extremes some prisons will go to in order to convert prisoners, including trying to eliminate recreation time so prisoners will be forced to attend Christian services instead, or giving the (Christian) prison chaplain the power to determine what programs and groups will be allowed, which sometimes results in prisoners of other faiths losing their support groups.) When is a line being crossed? And what does our prison system say about the nature of forgiveness and what it means to be a changed person?
There are a lot of tricky questions here, none of which have easy answers, and I appreciated how Erzen wrestled with them. This isn't just an academic book—she went into different prisons, viewed programs firsthand, and interviewed prisoners, wardens, and program coordinators for their input. There is a lot of valuable information from many different sources here. It would be difficult not to learn a lot from this book—and given America's exploding prison population, it's information we very much need.
If I had one criticism, it would be that I think the book could have used another pass with the editor. Erzen's writing is always intelligible, but I think she can use extra support in editing for fluency. Quite a few of her sentences seem awkward, and could have been rephrased for more clarity and fluency. It's a minor quibble, though. This is not a fun book, but an important one all the same.
Disclaimer: I received a copy from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. An honest review was requested in exchange, but not required.
There are a lot of tricky questions here, none of which have easy answers, and I appreciated how Erzen wrestled with them. This isn't just an academic book—she went into different prisons, viewed programs firsthand, and interviewed prisoners, wardens, and program coordinators for their input. There is a lot of valuable information from many different sources here. It would be difficult not to learn a lot from this book—and given America's exploding prison population, it's information we very much need.
If I had one criticism, it would be that I think the book could have used another pass with the editor. Erzen's writing is always intelligible, but I think she can use extra support in editing for fluency. Quite a few of her sentences seem awkward, and could have been rephrased for more clarity and fluency. It's a minor quibble, though. This is not a fun book, but an important one all the same.
Disclaimer: I received a copy from LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. An honest review was requested in exchange, but not required.
December 30, 2019
I very rarely finish books that would earn a one-star rating from me, so I'll start with the good that got me to the end of this book. Erzen had researched the field extensively and cites hundreds of sources. From reading this book I've been able to develop a great list of other books and articles I'm looking forward to checking out.
Now the bad. All those sources lack a coherent organization. Chapters at best vaguely resemble their titles and even when they do the dialogue constantly wanders into a diatribe against the prison system as a whole. References to faith-based ministries often seem little more than an afterthought.
In sections where faith-based organizations are discussed more comprehensively the author's open animus toward evangelical Christianity colors every discussion. You would think that in a book about faith-based ministries the perspective of people involved in those projects would be featured heavily, but Erzen often substitutes her own interpretation of what the ministries believe instead. The result is a poor understanding of some key theology and selective inclusion of facts that paints a one-sided picture.
Primarily, I'm disappointed. The amount of research and access afforded to this project could have resulted in a stellar book with merely the addition of a more journalistic approach and some better editing.
As is I cannot recommend it except for the notes section which provides a bibliography of more promising material.
Now the bad. All those sources lack a coherent organization. Chapters at best vaguely resemble their titles and even when they do the dialogue constantly wanders into a diatribe against the prison system as a whole. References to faith-based ministries often seem little more than an afterthought.
In sections where faith-based organizations are discussed more comprehensively the author's open animus toward evangelical Christianity colors every discussion. You would think that in a book about faith-based ministries the perspective of people involved in those projects would be featured heavily, but Erzen often substitutes her own interpretation of what the ministries believe instead. The result is a poor understanding of some key theology and selective inclusion of facts that paints a one-sided picture.
Primarily, I'm disappointed. The amount of research and access afforded to this project could have resulted in a stellar book with merely the addition of a more journalistic approach and some better editing.
As is I cannot recommend it except for the notes section which provides a bibliography of more promising material.
June 27, 2017
Since the beginning of the US prison system, religion has been suggested as a way to help rehabilitate criminals. We talk to Tanya Erzen, a professor of religion, about why that is and what role prison ministries play in the lives on inmates. Listen here: https://viewpointsradio.wordpress.com...
June 12, 2021
Very insightful book that observes and reports & concludes with what feels as a call to action.
I do wish there was sometime that demonstrated the distinction between a prison chaplain’s qualifications and a BCCi chaplain. It’s an important nuance and captures which chaplains are retained (evangelical/accepting of the institution) and which are fired (advocates for change and social justice.)
I do wish there was sometime that demonstrated the distinction between a prison chaplain’s qualifications and a BCCi chaplain. It’s an important nuance and captures which chaplains are retained (evangelical/accepting of the institution) and which are fired (advocates for change and social justice.)
September 17, 2018
Challenging, insanely-thought provoking. The author handles a difficult subject without bias.
February 4, 2019
One of the two best books I have read about women in prison and mass incarceration. Reveals the troubling aspects of the total abdication of volunteering and education to evangelical Christians.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews