Prison Religion

Prison religion refers to the faith and religiosity embedded in the experience of incarceration. For some prisoners, religious narratives seem to speak directly to their existential predicament, and so stories such as that of the Exodus in the Bible can occupy a special space in a believer's worldview. For others, the practice of religion in prison may be for less devout reasons or may even be something of a con game, a temporary or transitory appropriation, used for protection, perks, or simply to get out of the cell or to socialize. Sincere converts and practitioners have been distinguished primarily according to whether they continue practicing after release; some abandon religion, while others keep the faith.

Religion in prison, despite its contemporary prominence, is an understudied topic, which seems even stranger given the long and intermingled history of prisons and religious narrative. Although the Hindu deity Krishna was born in prison and Jesus Christ suffered imprisonment by Roman authorities, the modern prison or penitentiary was conceived in the United States by 18th-century Quakers as a corrective period of solitude for a sinner to pay penitence for his crimes and to reconcile with God. Today's prisons, in contrast, are governed by secular principles and suffer from overcrowding, racial schism, and violence. Accordingly, prisons have been hotbeds of legal action, including battles for religious rights that have raged all the way to the Supreme Court.

Since the early days of the penitentiary, the legend of the born-again Christian has poured through prison walls: A man goes to prison, is broken to the core, and resurrects himself with the power of Christ. Over the past 50 years, however, led by the likes of Malcolm X, the Christian legend is being rivaled by converts to Islam. As his case and countless others show, religion is a force that is perhaps better at reforming than prisons themselves.

Despite the reformatory influences of religion, as dens of social and political vengeance, prisons have tended to serve as havens for radical religious thought, whatever the tradition. A telling example is Sayyid Qutb, who is often cited as one of the chief ideological architects of al Qaeda and whose fundamentalist ideals were cemented in books written during his 10-year incarceration in Egypt. Such works have had a tremendous impact on contemporary global politics, and their continued influence is surely to be the subject of further study, especially as American-style supermax prisons continue to be expanded and exported throughout the globe.