In This Place Called Prison - by Rachel Ellis (Paperback)

About the Book

"In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid and unique examination of religion within prison and argues for its key role among some of society's most vulnerable. Although prison is defined by control--from rules and routines to mandatory labor and monitored visits--for many, religion offers a way out. Religion challenges what it means to be punished and affords community and connection in the face of fear and isolation. Rachel Ellis spent twelve months conducting ethnographic research inside the guarded gates of Mapleside Prison, a US state women's correctional facility, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and religious volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis sets the scene of mass incarceration today, detailing how contemporary prisons both reflect and worsen the systemic racial, social, and gender inequalities characteristic of the American landscape of profound stratification. She also offers insight into how religion relates to the carceral system, tracing the role of religious institutions throughout the history of prison punishment. Offering a trenchant account of how religion collides and colludes with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and control, In This Place Called Prison speaks to the human quest for dignity and light in even the darkest of places"--

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"This is sociology at its best: counterintuitive, theoretically rigorous, methodologically sound, substantively important, and beautifully written. For scholars and researchers interested in the latent functions that seemingly benign institutions play in the domination of vulnerable populations, I cannot recommend Rachel Ellis's In This Place Called Prison more enthusiastically."--Sandra Susan Smith, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice, Harvard Kennedy School

"Few works expose the core of America's complex religion of punishment and patriarchy better than this remarkable book. It is a revelation, a reckoning, and hopefully a Road to Damascus moment for the field."--Shadd Maruna, author of Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives

"Through deft storytelling and sensitive ethnography, Ellis unravels the symbiosis of two quintessentially American institutions--prison and Christianity. Through the eyes of women behind bars, we witness religion's counterintuitive power to ease but also exacerbate the pains of imprisonment."--Forrest Stuart, author of Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row

"In This Place Called Prison adds a much-needed carceral ethnography to the dearth of scholarship on women's prisons and offers powerful new insights into the role of religion in incarcerated women's lives. A beautifully written and important work."--Jody Miller, author of Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence

"Ellis's book is a timely and important contribution to the growing body of ethnographic literature on the societal effect of mass incarceration. This gripping and well-written account provides a fresh perspective not only on the understudied demographic of women in prison but also on how imprisonment takes a brutal and unrecognized toll on women, the rest of their families, and their religious lives."--Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City

Review Quotes

"In This Place Called Prison: Women's Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment is an ethnographic account of religious life in a women's prison, pseudonymously called Mapleside, on the east coast of the United States. Through interviews with Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish incarcerated women; religious program volunteers; and prison staff and chaplains, sociologist Rachel Ellis investigates how religion offers incarcerated women tools both to resist and yield to carceral power."-- "American Religion"

"Ellis is a skilled and empathetic ethnographer. . .The women about whom she writes are complex people navigating a world of very limited choices."
-- "Law & Society Review"

"This book is a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary study of the law, and it would make a powerful contribution to conversations in sociology, philosophy, ethics, political science, religion, and gender studies classrooms--as well as to scholarly research agendas."-- "Law, Culture and the Humanities"

"By showing how religion in prison is both a resource and a power, as well as a source of power and control, Ellis makes an original and relevant contribution to debates in the sociology of religion and prison sociology."-- "Sociology of Religion"

"Ellis switches brilliantly between major structural analysis that contextualizes and personal stories that tell the cases of particular women. She is indeed interested most of all in the personal transformation that incarcerated women undergo and in the role that religion can play here."-- "Journal of Contemporary Religion"

"This is an excellent book that is easily accessible, thought provoking, and sheds light on an important, but under studied, topic."-- "Review of Religious Research"

"Accessible and well-written, In This Place Called Prison will engage not only students of sociology and carceral studies, but scholars of lived religion, gender and sexuality, and political theology, as well."-- "Political Theology Journal"

"Ellis develops three-dimensional, nuanced portrayals of the interiority of women's lives, recognizing women's full and complex humanity in ways neither the carceral nor religious discourses that are the object of her study do. Ellis is an exceptionally skilled, ethical, and transparent ethnographer. Her methodological appendix should be required reading in sociological research methods classes."-- "Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion"

"Ellis' contributions are significant to a plethora of academic fields, while her writing style is easily digestible as she recalls the lived experiences of the women at Mapleside Prison."-- "Gender and Society"

"Ellis' piercing study, beautifully written, vividly demonstrates the double-edged sword of religion in prison - its capacity to liberate and its equal power to subjugate."
-- "Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books"

"This book is highly valuable as an experience that helps readers build a mental schema of some of the women inmates' realities of incarceration."-- "Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work"

About the Author

Rachel Ellis is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.