Exposing the Audacious Project to Make Christian Converts in America's Prisons

[Heddi]

http://www.alternet.org/books/exposing-audacious-project-make-christian-converts-americas-prisons

Exposing the Audacious Project to Make Christian Converts in America's Prisons
With a higher incarceration rate than anywhere in the world, the United States prison system has placed its faith in Christian prisoners.


The following is an excerpt from the new book God in Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Ministries in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Tanya Erzen (Beacon Press, 2017). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press:



Today, all over the United States, with federal assistance and private volunteerist zeal, a quiet faith-based revolution is taking place in fits and starts in state and federal prisons from minimum to maximum security.

Christian prison ministries, religious volunteers, policymakers, conservative politicians, fiscal conservatives, private contractors, and evangelical and nondenominational Christians all attest to the power of faith to transform people in prison. Whereas prison authorities and outsiders have long viewed prisoners’ claims to religious conversion and transformation a ruse, a way of convincing others that they were reformed, supporters of ministry tout faith-based interventions in prison as the most effective form of rehabilitation. Once derided and trivialized by skeptical prison authorities, prison ministry is now a legitimate rehabilitative program.

...

“Faith,” at first glance, appears to be an innocuous or neutral term, but in prison ministry, it most often stands for a Protestant form of Christianity. In many states, nondenominational Protestant Christians make up more than 85 percent of the volunteers who enter the prison. These statistics include the vast numbers of religious volunteers, working under the supervision of primarily Christian chaplains, who, throughout the day, regularly conduct worship services, Bible studies, AA and addiction groups, trauma counseling, GED programs, anger management programs, and mental health assessments in prison chapels. But many groups and ministries call themselves faith-based or spiritual to avoid violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits government from favoring one religion over another.

...
he faith-based ministries flock to prisons to convert, pray, teach, and proselytize, but they tend to neglect why people end up there in the first place. In the prison where I direct a college program, there are few wealthy people with college degrees. Whereas at the elite liberal arts school where I am a professor, my students come from primarily middle- and upper-class families. My prison students, 90 percent of whom report childhood abuse and sexual and domestic violence, do not have parents who went to college; they mainly grew up poor and contend daily with addictions and mental illness. Women represent the fastest-growing segment of the prison population in the United States. The United States has one-third of the world’s female prisoners. Initially, the War on Drugs disproportionately affected African American women. In recent years, the number of white and Latina women imprisoned for violent offenses and property offenses has increased substantially. The rising rates of low-income white women having contact with the criminal justice system are likely a consequence of the recent sharp deterioration in their health and social conditions.

...

As prisons have become increasingly overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded, faith-based groups perform an essential service in maintaining control and authority. The ministries embody the benefits of privatization for fiscal conservatives who argue that allowing faith-based groups free rein inside prison is fiscally efficient. If the state has jettisoned any financial commitment to rehabilitation and reform, prison ministries can fill the gap. Wilbert Rideau, an author and editor who spent forty-four years in Angola prison, told me, “Faith-based groups have been invented and foisted on the public by authorities so they appear to be doing something rather than just warehousing people. It’s window-dressing.”

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Schools...prisons...hospitals....Religions love captive audicences

[WhiteTara]

1. Chuck Colson started this

when he went to prison for Watergate. Leave it to a GOPer to make money off everything.