Faith in the Possibility of Personal Transformation: Variations on a Theme in Religion and Corrections in the United States tracks the lived and historical connections between faith in the possibility of personal transformation and incarceration in the United States. Based primarily on ethnographic research at the Berkshire County House of Correction (BCHC), a medium security prison in Massachusetts for men as defined by the state, this dissertation documents how anticipation around personal transformation is narrated, embodied, and deployed behind bars—with particular attention to rehabilitation programming, religious services, and parole hearings.
Situating these contemporary phenomena against a backdrop of North American religious history and penal reform, my work shows how the rehabilitative ideal of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries tried to motivate the transformable prisoner but keep intractable ones locked away for good. Such distinctions were and continue to be coded along intersections of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality. Attending mainly to influences across penal reformers, American metaphysical religionists, and Christianity, my project contends that the people who have volunteered, worked, and lived in the American prison have helped create what many people in the United States, today, may simply think of as “spirituality,” even as it is a shapeshifting category that has developed through multifarious dynamics of power.
Across an introduction, conclusion, six body chapters, and a methods appendix, this project shows how rehabilitative and religious programs encourage incarcerated people to embrace the possibility of redemptive personal transformation, through meaning-making modes and embodied disciplines that are usually articulated under the banner of spirituality. This dissertation ultimately shows that these mutually reinforcing programs at once offer solace and pragmatic life tools that some incarcerated people combinatively embrace, while also spiritualizing and naturalizing the state’s prerogative to incarcerate. The spiritual creativity of incarcerated people and group facilitators notwithstanding, faith in the possibility of personal transformation can place the onus for change on individuals, releasing from obligation the systems that have collectively disenfranchised the incarcerated. Through a long view of American religious and penal history, faith in the possibility of personal transformation harmonizes with romantic yearnings in American culture, surfacing a startling conviction: that prison is the most exemplary place for personal change. / 2026-09-09T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49217 |
| Date | 09 September 2024 |
| Creators | Napior, Amanda J.G. |
| Contributors | Barnes, Linda L. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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