Lecture

This lecture was developed by Aaron Griffith, a doctoral student in American religious history at Duke Divinity School. His research focuses on the history of twentieth century American evangelicalism and mass incarceration. He is active in local prison work through Alamance-Orange Prison Ministry, where he is a volunteer and board member. He writes on American religion, politics, and culture for popular audiences in publications like The Washington Post and for Religion News Service. He is also a graduate of Wheaton College.

In this lecture I will be introducing you to some of the major trends in the historical development of American prison chaplaincy. For parts of the lecture I will also be talking more broadly about religious work within the context of corrections, as sometimes chaplaincy was not the prime driver of inmate religious experience. This lecture will be a very broad overview, one that is generally chronological. Because we will be moving through several large periods from colonial America to the present, we’ll necessarily not be able to attend to certain developments in great detail. But it’s important to spell out this very broad history in order to give you a sense of where we have been and what has changed along the way. We will be looking at four big periods: the colonial period, the antebellum period, the progressive era, and the post-WWII era.

One final point before we begin: this lecture relies on the historical work of several scholars who have written extensively on prisons, religion, and American history. I will make reference to some of them throughout the lecture, and all of my sources are listed in the bibliography. If you are interested in reading further on any of the periods or topics I introduce, I encourage you to check these resources out.

The overarching thesis that I want to drive home in this lecture is as follows: the history of chaplaincy and religious work in corrections is firmly embedded within the history of corrections and of American culture more broadly. Like all Christians, chaplains found themselves both constrained and empowered by the cultural and religious trends operating in both American corrections and society. But, first let’s look briefly at the origin of the term chaplain.

As Thomas Beckner describes in his book Correctional Chaplains: Keepers of the Cloak, the etymology of the word chaplain is rooted in the Latin word capella, which means “cloak.” The word grew out of the story of the fourth century Christian, St. Martin, who met a poor man in the dead of winter. Influenced by the call to care for the “least of these” in Matthew 25:36-37, Martin took his sword and cut his cloak, giving half to the man and keeping half for himself. The term chaplain is indebted to this image of someone who shares support with those in the storms of life, who offers the “cloak” of spiritual help and direction in difficult times. Let’s now turn to the history of prison chaplaincy, beginning with the colonial era.

The colonial era was the period that started with the arrival of European colonists in the early seventeenth century and ran up to the American Revolution at the end of the eighteenth. For our purposes we are going to be focusing primarily on English colonists on the east coast. Though the English colonists were a diverse group, the ones who are probably best known to us are the Puritans, a group of Calvinist Christians who dissented from the establishment Anglican church and came to occupy what is today known as New England.

Before we start talking about religion and punishment in colonial America, think with me for a moment about the context at this time. Colonial America was mainly rural; there were no big cities, only small settlements and villages. It was also very spread out; there was a lot of space between these small settlements, and often they might not have a ton of regular contact with each other. It was also dangerous. The wilderness is a rough place, and colonists frequently faced the threats of disease, starvation, harsh weather, and attacks from Native Americans or French colonists. As a result, institutions of governance in colonial America tended to be fairly informal and disestablished.

There simply wasn’t enough time, people, or resources to sustain complex local governments. And when institutions or governance did exist, they operated in a limited manner; keeping order was the primary goal, not social change. Attention was given only to aspects of common life that were needed for basic survival.

But though it was rural and dangerous, colonial America wasn’t a lawless society. So, what do you do when someone commits an offense that threatens the well-being of the community? As you might guess, punishment was pretty limited in scope. There simply weren’t the resources available to construct prisons, nor were there enough people around to justify developing any large or sophisticated system of criminal justice. As a result, when punishment did occur it was primarily physical – offenders would be whipped, placed in the stocks, or in the most serious cases, hanged.

If incarceration did occur, it was only as a temporary measure, in small jails where offenders awaited trial. And most importantly, punishment was primarily about deterrence and retribution. In a society that was seemingly under constant threat of falling apart, harsh punishment was meted out so as to warn the community that they should resist the temptation to commit crimes. And for those who did commit crimes, their punishment was a reminder that they had committed a grave offense that deserved to be met with an equally harsh response.

Colonial America did not have dedicated prison chaplains. But religion was very important in this society, and it had a role in ordering the punishment that was meted out. Because colonial society was very community-driven, local ministers often were relied upon as leaders who helped the rest of the population make sense of events. This was especially important for Puritans, who had a profound sense of their covenantal status as God’s chosen people; ministers helped them determine what events were signs of God’s favor or judgment, and how they might respond more faithfully to God as a community.

As a result, when serious crimes were committed, ministers often had public role in helping the community make sense of the events and the punishment that would be meted out. As the historian Scott Seay has shown, the best example of this was the common practice of Puritan preaching at executions. Once someone was convicted of a serious crime, the community would gather for their hanging, and the local minister would preach a sermon. In these “execution sermons,” they would explain to the community and the condemned person alike the seriousness of the offense and the need for God’s judgment, walking everyone gathered through what was about to happen and the theological implications therein.

Much more could be said about colonial American punishment and religion, but some of its distinctive aspects will come into sharper view as we start talking about the next period: the antebellum era, or roughly the first half of the 19th century. After the revolution, American society begins to change rapidly. The population surges with the arrival of more and more people, and society becomes more diverse with the immigration of a heightened variety of ethnic and religious groups. But American society still largely defines itself in Protestant terms. Many Protestant leaders start to think optimistically about the possibilities of reforming problematic parts of the new nation; for example, many of them saw issues with the poverty that accompanied the growth of American cities.

For our purposes, it’s important to note that many Protestant reformers started reconsidering older practices of punishment. They questioned the harsh beatings, hangings, and public humiliations of previous generations, seeing them as barbaric. But more importantly, they saw these punishments as insufficient because they knew that they did little to reform the behavior of criminals. A beating might serve as a deterrent (though even that was questionable), but more problematically, it did little to teach an offender about the errors of their ways or how they might change their lives for the better. And a hanging, well, that was even worse – many of the Protestant reformers began speaking out against the death penalty (or at least its wide application) because they knew that death gave a criminal no opportunity for reform.

Part of this shift in thinking about the purposes of punishment had to do with changes in the type of the faith that was being propagated in early America. Remember, the Puritans we talked about earlier were deeply Calvinist. If you know anything about Calvinism, you know that it has a strong sense of pessimism about humanity’s ability to reform or do anything to better their sinful state – to use the famous Calvinist phrase, humans are “totally depraved.” But around the time of the revolution, a new religious sentiment started to take hold: the idea that people can be improved, that they could even be perfected. This sentiment, which had wide appeal, was indebted to the more optimistic theology of groups that started exerting more and more power on the American landscape—groups like the Methodists. Groups like the Methodists had a much stronger view than Calvinists of the possibility of human perfectibility through sanctification, as well as more confidence in the ability of the human will to cooperate with God’s grace. This new theological outlook was sharpened all the more by new democratic currents in American thought, ideas like those found in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that proclaimed human self-sufficiency and self-rule.

Within this context Protestant reformers began building prisons with the aim of perfecting and reforming wayward criminals. Features of these religiously-informed prisons included workshops (where inmates could stay busy and receive job skills training) and chapels (where inmates could hear the reforming message of salvation). Perhaps most striking though were the solitary cells that many of these prisons had. More than spaces of isolation for bad behavior, these cells were intended to function as quiet sanctuaries where the inmates could spend time thinking through their sin and listening for God’s voice. These cells were patterned after the solitary rooms in monasteries where monks lived. These monks were known as penitents as they silently sought God’s presence, and in hopes that their prisoners could adopt similar virtues, the Protestant reformers began calling their prisons penitentiaries. The point to note here is that religious instruction to prisoners (which we usually think of as coming from a chaplain) was actually coming from the prison itself. Religious workers (who we would call chaplains) might have a minor role in guiding prisoners or in leading services, but the overall burden of spiritual formation was guided by the very architecture of the penitentiary.

These Protestant reformers saw themselves as humanitarians, but unfortunately their idealistic vision of reform soon encountered problems. Inmate populations surged, dramatically overcrowding prisons. Internal violence in prisons was a problem, as different ethnic and religious groups warred with one another. Most problematically, local governments (seeing their constituencies as indifferent to inmate reform) did not adequately fund penitentiary construction, maintenance, or staffing.

As a result of these problems, prison discipline became harsher in an attempt to keep order. As the historian Jennifer Graber has shown, the original guiding metaphor for the penitentiary had been the “garden,” a space where inmates could peacefully contemplate their sin and hopefully perfect their behavior. Now, in the midst of harsher discipline, the guiding metaphor was “furnace” – the prison was a place where immorality could be burned away, often painfully. Inmate reform was still the goal, but pain was now justified as a means to this end. In the midst of this shift, a new role emerged: the prison chaplain.

The prison chaplain was a role that arose at this point to maintain the reforming vision of the penitentiary. As a “furnace,” the prison was becoming a harsher and harsher place, and the chaplain was needed to explain to inmates the spiritual rationale for their punishment. They emphasized the bad things about prison, helping inmates see how God approved of their confinement and how God was at work to make their suffering redemptive. As a result, in the words of Graber, “religion bolstered prison discipline, and prison discipline bolstered religion.”

Prisons continued to grow in their cruelty as the 19th century wore on. Corporal punishment became more common, but unlike the colonial years these punishments were not single, one-off events – water torture and beatings became a part of daily prison life that extended over the years an inmate might be confined. Some chaplains even left in protest of the harshness. By the Civil War, as Graber notes, the guiding metaphor for prisons had shifted from “furnace” to simply “hell” – there was no redemptive quality to incarceration, and little Christian involvement that did not toe the harsh line. The irony then is that humanitarian Christians had helped invent and build these spaces, but now they found themselves increasingly shut out of them.

The harshness of the prisons in America did not go unnoticed. Toward the end of the nineteenth century people started to take note of the sad state of American punishment and began reclaiming the rehabilitative purpose of punishment. But, this reform and call for rehabilitation would proceed differently than that in the antebellum era.

But first, some context. By the end of the nineteenth century, modernity had taken full root in America. Industrialization had reshaped the economic order, liberal notions of human personhood and progress had gained traction in many corners of American intellectual life, and science had started to become a recognized public authority for determining truth. For these reasons, America entered what we now know as the “Progressive Era” at that time. The Progressive Era refers to the power that certain notions of human progress started to have in American culture: many people increasingly believed that human society could (and should) progress in more just directions through use of modern scientific tools. For example, Progressive Era intellectuals started developing social scientific disciplines like sociology to understand social problems, and reformers focused their efforts on increasing government regulation to address problems resulting from industrialization. In doing so (often unintentionally), social problems and solutions became secularized, seen not so much in theological terms (like personal sin) as in scientific ones.

These shifts had important implications for prisons and punishment. Reformers started talking about crime not as a problem of sin, but a problem of socialization. They started to talk in terms of a criminal’s background or environment, pointing out how factors related to a person’s upbringing, gender, economic situation, etc. had profound implications for what choices the person would make in life. Reformers therefore started adding new features to American prisons, drawn from the conceptual tools of modern science and directed towards these environmental problems. They developed classification models for inmates (this is where “maximum” and “minimum” security come into play) in hopes that suiting an inmate to the correct environment might engender reform. They started using tools to help inmates adjust to modern life, relying on psychological therapy and treatment. The cumulative result was something that would be called the “new penology” – a vast system of viewing inmates and crime in terms of their environment (not personal choice) and directing treatment in response to help them change their ways (not retributive punishment).

As you might expect, this shift had big implications for religious work in prisons. On the whole, prisons were becoming more secular spaces; crime was no longer spoken of in terms of “sin”, but in terms of maladjustment, and the new solution is not so much Jesus or sanctification, but treatment. While chaplains used to work with prisoners to help them understand their incarceration, they were now joined by social workers, psychologists, or other criminological professionals. And when chaplains did exert influence, it looked more and more like the “secular” work of prison professionals. As the scholar Andrew Skotnicki has shown, chaplains are some of the key figures in transforming the prison in this way. For example, instead of trying to simply convert or disciple inmates, chaplains started interviewing inmates to get a sense of their backgrounds, or bringing in civic leaders and businessmen to teach inmates how to gain more generalized virtues of good character and industriousness. Though they might still be motivated by the old time gospel, chaplains placed more and more trust in increasingly secular, bureaucratic prison programming.

It should be noted, however, that all of these Progressive Era reforms can be overstated. Prisons remained largely awful places, plagued by overcrowding, increasing costs, and public apathy. The point to remember though is that the broader ideology regarding prisons and punishment (and chaplaincy) had changed, even though this did not necessarily make prisons better places.

In many ways the Progressive Era is still with us today in terms of how chaplaincy and religious services work in prisons. But a new shift would take hold in the later twentieth century that adds some new elements to the Progressive Era sensibilities. We now move to the era following World War II, which, in terms of the history of prison chaplaincy, is largely the era in which we still find ourselves.

In the decades following WWII there was a new shift in prison life and American criminal justice: even though prisons remained harsh places, there was an increased sense of prisoners’ rights. This was in large part a result of the rise of broader “rights” movements in American society in the 1950s and 60s, like the civil rights and women’s rights movements, that began to exert cultural sway. Prisoners started to demand better treatment and access to better living conditions, winning important court cases to that effect. The prisoners’ rights movement had significant implications for religious minorities, which to this point in history had not been seen as all that important. While religious minorities had always been present in prisons, they now were able to lobby courts for access to equal treatment and space to practice their beliefs. For example, as Edgardo Rotman notes, Black Muslims won the right to be legally recognized in 1965, which in turn gave them the ability to obtain copies of the Koran, eat pork-free meals, and hold their own services. Other religious groups, from Wiccans to Jehovah’s Witnesses, all came to be recognized and allowed to practice their own faiths.

But with such a large variety of religious expressions (and the fact that many prisoners change religions at some point during their incarceration), guaranteeing equal treatment proved difficult given the fact that Protestants had usually been in control of chaplaincies even as they were increasingly marginalized from the Civil War onward. Therefore, as scholars like Winnifred Sullivan, James Beckford, and Sophie Gilliat have shown, the role of chaplaincy began to evolve further from a conversionary role into a maintenance role for helping prisoners avail themselves of the free market of religion. Chaplains still came from particular religious backgrounds (increasingly non-Protestant ones), but, as Beckford and Gilliat note, by the mid-20th century there were officially no “Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, etc. chaplains…only staff chaplains who happen to be Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, (or) Catholic.” Paired with this was the fact that prisons started avoiding particularistic denominational titles like “Imam” or “Reverend” and instead used “chaplain” in order to limit the appearance of partiality. Chaplains would enlist outside volunteers and contractors to provide religious services, insuring that there was no total one-size-fits-all approach, but these volunteers were still selected by the chaplain and increasingly not allowed to proselytize.

It is important to note that by the late twentieth century, the maintenance role of the prison chaplain had parallels in other American institutions. We could say many of the same things about chaplains in the military, hospitals, airports or elsewhere in recent decades: though they may belong to a particular religious tradition or denomination, their main role is to be a manager of the religious diversity of people who belong to the institution: hospital patients, soldiers, travelers, etc. Their primary role is not to convert, but to provide “religious services” or “spiritual support.” Note the vagueness in terms like these – they are intended to be broad, impartial, and applicable to any group.

However, criticisms began to emerge of this new prison chaplaincy paradigm. One such critique argues that “prison diversity” isn’t really diversity at all – it is the creation of the artificial category of religion by the state. The state still sets the bounds for what is religiously acceptable or not, and usually leans to recognizing something as religious if it is quietist or purely “spiritual.” This is why private Bible reading in prison can be considered religious (and therefore be protected), but more public or seemingly disruptive forms of faith are not. For example, in 2015 the state of Alabama ruled that all inmates must wear their hair short, even though certain Native American religions require men to not cut their hair. So the state here is actually then in the business of determining what counts as religion, even though it portrays its own activities as “secular” and categorically different from “religion.” In the words of one historian of American law and religion, Winnifred Sullivan, the role of prison chaplain shows how “American religion continues to idealize the free church model while it is singularly bound by secular logics.”

In this brief lecture I have tried to show how religious work has been embedded in the history of American prisons and within streams of American history more broadly. I hope that you’ve gotten a sense for how complicated this story is. It is a story where good intentions didn’t always create good results, and where theological aspirations were often constrained by the cultural currents of the day. If nothing else I hope you have gotten a sense of how many variables one has to pay attention to when thinking about prison chaplaincy: there is the religion of society (what types of punishment society expects), the ideologies of institutions (the logic of punishment practices), and the religions of inmates, to name only a few.

All this complexity can make for a pretty bleak picture. So I want to close with an 1873 account that represents many of the layers of the “complicated hope” for how prison and religion relate in American life. This is from Estelle Freedman’s book Their Sisters’ Keepers:

On October 8, 1873 Mrs. Sallie Hubbard – the “Wabash Murderess” – became the first inmate of an exclusively female prison in the United States. Along with her husband, she had murdered a pioneer family of seven which had sought refuge in her home. Mr. Hubbard was executed while his wife received a life sentence. The sheriff and two deputies who transported Sallie Hubbard to the new women’s prison applied heavy manacles to contain her. But when superintendent Sarah Smith received the woman, she dramatically heralded the contrasts of men’s and women’s prison reform. Directing the men to ‘Take off her shackles; she is my prisoner, not yours,’ Smith embraced her fallen sister, prayed for her, and showed her to a room decorated with bedspread, clothed table, curtains, a pot of flowers, a Bible, and hymn book. In time, Hubbard became a model prisoner.

The last line, “in time, Hubbard became a model prisoner,” references how religion has served as mode of control and of justifying the prison status quo. The fact that this account is about women references the troubling gendered norms that many Christian prison reformers found themselves occupied with in the late 19th century. But we also see clearly here what faith can do in situations of brokenness. Sarah Smith, the woman who welcomed the prisoner here, was a reformer driven by her own personal faith. She saw it as her duty to give women prisoners some dignity, and so she tried to make inmates’ cells more humane by giving them curtains, flowers, and religious books. She was a leader in the women’s prison movement, which, while totally bound up in Victorian era conceptions of gender and femininity, was fundamentally about keeping women away from the dangers of men’s prisons. But perhaps most importantly, Smith saw humanity, or perhaps, the image of God in Sallie Hubbard. She knew she was a murderer, and yet insisted on having her in her facility and giving her a chance at reform (instead of locking her away and throwing away the key). She saw Sallie Hubbard as someone who, in spite of her evil acts, did not deserve to wear shackles. She deserved prayer, and a hug. “Take off her shackles; she is my prisoner, not yours.” Paternalistic, maybe, but merciful - definitely. I hope that this lecture has given you a sense of the complications in understanding prison chaplaincy, hopefully so that as you find your place in this history you can see your own participation in the complications and sin of the present age, but maybe also carve out spaces where God’s mercy can shine through.