Building Skills Behind Bars: The Biblical Case for a Constructive Prison Culture (original) (raw)
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How programs in prisons are challenging the who, where, how, and what of theological education.pdf
Teaching Theology and Religion, 2019
This paper claims that programs in prisons are challenging the very who, where, how, and what of theological education. The author draws on research from the fields of pedagogy and prison studies, nearly a decade of experience teaching master's level seminary‐style classes in prison, and the findings of a two‐year cohort of prison educators convened by the Association of Theological Schools for their Educational Models and Practices Project. Addressing displacement as a learning strategy, classroom diversity, the use of student experience, narrative grading strategies, and classroom ritual, the author shows how the teaching strategies emerging from prison classrooms provide vibrant models for the theological academy at large.
Practical Theology & the Shift from Prison Reform to Prison Abolition
As mass incarceration and the racial and socio-economic injustices that fuel it continues to plague the U.S., contemporary religious scholarship has become increasingly aware of and responsive to these problems through a variety of theological analyses and ethical calls for change. Yet many of these religious responses seem to fall short, myopic in their analyses of what has created and sustained the prison industrial complex and limited in their subsequent calls for reform. Drawing upon the work of Richard Osmer and Juan Luis Segundo, this paper argues that practical theology offers a useful corrective theo-ethical lens, their methodological frames simultaneously engendering more precise and thorough analysis as well as more imaginative and liberative responses. Specifically, this paper argues that practical theology calls for a shift in theo-ethical discourse and action from prison reform to that of prison abolition.
The Christian Virtue of Justice and the U.S. Prison
Journal of Catholic Social Thought, 2011
There are 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States. This represents both the highest rate of imprisonment and the highest absolute number of imprisoned persons in the world. As a result, much attention has been given to the need to reduce our confined population. No doubt a reconsideration of our criminal justice and sentencing policies seems in order. However, even if our numbers were to consistently decline, another critical problem would remain. Regardless of how many live within its walls, is the United States prison truly functioning as an instrument of justice?
From Violation to Revelation: Finding Faith in the Depths of Prison Hell
2014
List of Tables v Table of Contents vi Chapter 1: Introduction to the Study 1 Statement of the Problem 1 Purpose of the Study 2 Chapter 2: The Criminal Justice System: An Overview 4 Currently, there is little research that examines if worship services and faith-based programs aid inmates in preventing recidivism. Accordingly, there are even less scientific studies that examine the association between participation in prison-based religious services and/or faith-based programs and inmate misconduct while in custody (Johnson,
Voices from American prisons: faith, education and healing
Restorative Justice
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History of Religions, 2011
Biblical Justice "I KNOW ABOUT MY WRONGS. I can't forget my sin. You are the one I have sinned against. I have done what you say is wrong. So you are right when I speak. You are fair when you judge me." 1 Thus speaks King David to God, translated into contemporary English, in The Sycamore Tree Project, PFM's curriculum to foster offender-victim reconciliation. The project, the instructor's manual declares, "deals with sin and its consequences, with offenders and victims, offering a biblical model of transformation." The offender and the victim are invited to understand themselves and their relationship to each other, as the psalmist understands the relationship of King David to his God. Through the translation, King David becomes a convicted and imprisoned American; sin is defined by U.S. law, and the victim (a proxy for the criminal justice system) stands in for God. Biblical warrant for what IFI presents as the biblical practice of reconciliation is also found in the story of Zacchaeus as told in the New Testament's Gospel of Luke. 2 According to the IFI lesson plan for class 1, Zacchaeus was a crooked tax collector who was so short of stature that he climbed a sycamore tree to get a glimpse of Jesus passing through Jericho. The IFI account says that "he became very rich by stealing from his own Jewish neighbors." Jesus saw Zacchaeus in the tree and called out to him, saying that he would come to Zacchaeus's house that evening for dinner. Zacchaeus climbed down to speak to Jesus and, later in the chapter, he is reported to have repented of his sins. The IFI lesson describes Zacchaeus as "an offender" who repents of having profited from his position and promises thereafter to give to the poor and restore any amounts he has unjustly gained. This first lesson of The Sycamore Tree Project teaches the prisoner to identify with Zacchaeus as a sinner/offender and to seek reconciliation with God and his victims, as Zacchaeus reportedly did. The difficulty with this reading of the story of Zacchaeus is that in the biblical text Zacchaeus is not portrayed as having committed any offense against Roman law. Zacchaeus was not a criminal. As the IFI lesson plan itself later strangely acknowledges, Zacchaeus's practices were not merely legal under Roman law; Jewish tax collectors were compensated for their work by the surcharge they received, not by the Roman government. Without the label of criminal, Zacchaeus's faults might be seen as more generally attribut-Brought
Prisoners Helping Prisoners Change: A Study of Inmate Field Ministers Within Texas Prisons
International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 2019
Research on incarcerated offenders trained to help prisoners change is rare because programs that equip inmates with practical capacities for helping others rehabilitate in prison hardly exist. An exception is the Field Ministry program in Texas, which enlists inmates who have graduated from a prison-based seminary to work as “Field Ministers” and serve other inmates in various capacities. We hypothesize that inmate exposure to Field Ministers is inversely related to antisocial factors and positively to prosocial ones. We applied manifest-variable structural equation modeling to analyze data from a survey of a random sample of male inmates at three maximum-security prisons where the Field Ministry program operated. We found that inmates exposed more frequently to the Field Ministry and for a longer time period tended to report lower levels of criminological risk factors and aggressiveness and higher levels of virtues and predictors of human agency as well as religiosity and spiritua...