Abstract
This chapter considers incarcerated girls’ accounts of Christian faith-based programming in a juvenile detention facility. The arguments derive from interviews and routine participant observation at a facility in the Midwestern United States over a two-year period. During the research interviews, young women articulated commitments to take responsibility for changing their lives through religious belief and faith. Adult volunteers, who are mostly evangelical Christians, guided the youth to believe that a religious conversion would enable hopeful futures with success, employment, and forgiveness. Faith-based volunteer activities therefore ask youth to use their time in prison as an opportunity for prayer, heart change, and Bible study. The chapter shows how girls took up and expanded religious discourse through repeated narratives that prison “saved” them from early deaths, violent home lives, and addiction struggles. The chapter argues that youth at the facility repeat the idea that they can change their pathways through personal choice and faith in God, and it questions the effects of these beliefs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
http://www.epiphanyministryinc.org/program.html, last accessed 08 September 2019.
- 2.
Also http://www.epiphanyministryinc.org/home.html, accessed 08 September 2019.
References
Abrams, L. S., & Anderson-Nathe, B. (2013). Compassionate confinement: A year in the life of Unit C. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Agyepong, T. (2018). The criminalization of Black children: Race, gender, and delinquency in Chicago’s juvenile justice system, 1899-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press.
Armstrong, R. (2014). Trusting the untrustworthy: the theology, practice, and implications of faith-based volunteers’ work with ex-prisoners. Studies in Christian Ethics, 27(3), 299–317.
Bernard, T., & Kurlycheck, M. (2010). The cycle of juvenile justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cox, A. (2018). Trapped in a vice: The consequences of confinement for young people. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Erzen, T. (2008). Religious literacy in the faith-based prison. PMLA, 123(3), 659–664.
Erzen, Y. (2017). God in Captivity: The Rise of Faith-Based Prison Ministries in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Boston: Beacon Press.
Goodkind, S. (2009). “You can be anything you want, but you have to believe it”: Commercialized feminism in gender-specific programs for girls. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 34(2), 397–422.
Kallio, K., & Thomas, M. (2019). Intergenerational encounters, intersubjective age relations. Emotion, Space and Society, 32, 100575.
Maruna, S. (2009). ‘Virtue’s door unsealed is never sealed again’: Redeeming Redemption and the Seven-Year Itch. (pp. 52–60). In Natasha A. Frost, Joshua D. Freilich, and Todd R. Clear (Eds.), Contemporary Issues in Criminal Justice Policy: Policy Proposals From the American Society of Criminology Conference. Belmont, CA: Cengage/Wadsworth.
Maruna, S., Wilson, L., & Curran, K. (2006). Why God is so often found behind bars: Prison conversions and the crisis of self-narrative. Research in Human Development, 3(2&3), 161–184.
Morris, M. (2016). Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. New York: The New Press.
Pasko, L. (2008). The wayward girl revisited: Understanding the gendered nature of juvenile justice and delinquency. Sociology Compass, 2(3), 821–836.
Rios, V. (2011). Punished: Policing the lives of black and latino boys. New York: New York University Press.
Sankofa, J., Cox, A., Fader, J., Inderbitzen, M., Abrams, L., & Nurse, A. (2017). Juvenile corrections in the era of reform: A meta-synthesis of qualitative studies. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 62(7), 1763–1786.
Simmons, L. (2015). Crescent city girls: The lives of young black women in segregated New Orleans. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Thomas, M. (2019). “Y’all trying to make a mockery out of me”: The confined sexualities of girls in a US juvenile detention facility. Emotion, Space and Society, 32, 100533.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thomas, M.E. (2021). “This Place Saved My Life”: The Limits of Christian Redemption Narratives at a Juvenile Detention Facility for Girls. In: Cox, A., Abrams, L.S. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Youth Imprisonment. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68759-5_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68759-5_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-68758-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-68759-5
eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)