| In this study I examine religious programming in United States correctional facilities. In particular, I focus on the experiences of prison chaplains as they negotiate the correctional environment and interact with prison administrators, officers, and inmates. Through five years of participant observation in the American correctional chaplaincy scene and forty depth interviews with prison chaplains, I explore chaplains' navigation of competing penal goals of retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation.;The changing value of religious knowledge and practice in corrections contributes to a social setting in which chaplains' roles are fuzzy rather than clear, and contested rather than agreed upon. Though best characterized as liminal, chaplains' experiences are not without agency. They hold a unique position in the correctional hierarchy that requires them to flexibly move between different role set members and expectations. They do so through a process of role fusion, skillfully working with inmates and other staff in ways that embrace competing penal goals.;Through the cultivation of illusions of risk, chaplains' perspectives are institutionally shaped around custody and punishment and away from rehabilitation. Though the necessity of working at 'yellow alert' encourages chaplains to take a cynical view of inmates, chaplains simultaneously hope to turn inmates into better people through interpersonal emotion management and, specifically, through the ventilation of communally suppressed emotion. In doing so, chaplains define inmates' emotional rehabilitation as representative of the redeemed moral self. As institutional actors, chaplains have carved out a niche dedicated to the identity repair of inmates, with significant policy implications for the thousands of individuals being released from prisons every year. |
