Nongovernmental organizations and postprison life: Examining the role of religion

Abstract

This article examines the relevance of religion for nongovernmental organizations that work with formerly incarcerated people. Despite the increased visibility of religious nongovernmental organizations working with criminalized people, research on the nongovernmental sector and criminal justice still largely focuses on secular organizations. This article argues for the conceptual importance of religion and its role shaping work in this sector, and draws from the sociology of religion to theorize the importance of discourses and practices in organizational settings. I present a typology identifying nongovernmental organizations' religious approaches, which I developed using archival, interview, and observational data from 18 nongovernmental organizations in Wisconsin. I differentiate among nongovernmental organizations that I call secular, which stay away from religion, religiously inspired, which operate based on religious principles, and reciprocally religious, which hold expectations of religious practices from program participants. Moving beyond single-case studies enables a comparative analysis of the ideas and practices among actors that serve and seek to shape people leaving prison, whose work varies in terms of predominant denominations, assumptions about morality and sin, and relationships with churches and the medical profession. The results encourage further inquiry into what religious nongovernmental organizations do, why, and how, given the distinctive discursive and material resources and practices that they bring into work with criminalized people.

Inside or Outside the Criminal Justice System? The Example of Community Chaplaincy

“…This also applies to faith communities; Beckford () makes the point that members of ethno‐religious minorities are among the groups in society disproportionately under‐represented in formal volunteering. Both chaplaincies in this study received practical and financial help from local faith groups, but both suggested that there was scope for these groups to do more to support people leaving prison to participate in community life; faith communities do not always welcome people leaving prison (Kaufman ). There is more to be understood about the ways that religion matters in the penal voluntary sector.…”

“…This is an approach that values inclusion, forbids overt evangelism and responds to spiritual needs only if those are identified by service users. In similar vein, drawing on research conducted in the US, Kaufman () characterises non‐governmental organisations working with people leaving prison according to the organisation's relationship with religion. In this framework, community chaplaincy is ‘religiously inspired’ as it is ‘guided by loosely and not dogmatically understood religious principles’ (p. 8).…”

“…Taking the example of community chaplaincy, this article explores the extent to which the work of the voluntary sector is distinctive from that of the statutory sector. Community chaplaincy is used here as an illustration; it is not argued that it is somehow representative or typical of the sector (or even the religiously inspired (Kaufman ) organisations within the sector) as a whole.…”

Experiencing Justice from the Inside Out: Theological Considerations about the Church’s Role in Justice, Healing, and Forgiveness

“…Recent suggestions have been made that theology may have more to offer on matters related to the subjects of punishment, corrections, and rehabilitation than has often been acknowledged in the scholarly literature (Murphy 2003;Garvey 2003;Kaufman 2018). This includes not only the questions that particular theological frameworks and analytic tools bring for addressing these matters in the era of mass incarceration, and even the underlying theological foundations that gave rise to the contemporary situation, but also new forms of recourse and plausibility structures that may emerge as theological conceptualities are deployed, especially for explanatory research knowledge accounting for various experiential phenomena that includes both practices as well as conceptual structures that give rise to these various dynamics.…”

The Criminal Justice Voluntary Sector: Concepts and an Agenda for an Emerging Field

“…Voluntary organisations are heterogeneous, but are often registered charities. Differences include: functions; participants; income ranges; funding sources; size; aims; volunteer/paid staff/ex‐offender proportions; relationship(s) with statutory agencies; faith/secular basis (Kaufman ; Tomczak ).…”