In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid account of religious life within an institution designed to punish. Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women’s prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis shows how women draw on religion to navigate lived experiences of carceral control. A trenchant study of religion colliding and colluding with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and constraint, this book speaks to the quest for dignity and light against the backdrop of mass incarceration, state surveillance, and American inequality.
- ISBN10 0520384539
- ISBN13 9780520384538
- Publish Date 4 April 2023
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of California Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 280
- Language English