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University of California Press

About the Book

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.

About the Author

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

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Q&A with Rachel Ellis, author of In This Place Called Prison

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
Read More

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction
1. Thou Shalt Not: A Day in Prison 
2. Let There Be Light: Religious Life Behind Bars 
3. The Lord Is My Shepherd: Protestant Messages
of God’s Redemptive Plan 
4. Blessed Is The Fruit Of Thy Womb: Gender,
Religion, and Ideologies of the Family 
5. For Many Are Called, But Few Are Chosen:
Status and Dignity in the Prison Church 
Conclusion 
Epilogue: Out of the House of Bondage 

Acknowledgments 
Methodological Appendix 
Notes 
References 
Index

Reviews

"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
 "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
"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 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
"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
"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
"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
"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
 "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
"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 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

Awards

  • Michael J. Hindelang Outstanding Book Award 2024 2024, American Society of Criminology