Corrections_Today_September_October_2023_Vol.85_No.5

NEWS&VIEWS

CORRECTIONAL CHAPLAIN PERSPECTIVES

Chaplaincy as care, care as chaplaincy By Lia F. Kornmehl W hat is the modern case for correctional chap laincy? Cutting-edge From roughly the late-seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries, reverends dictated prison and jail policies, establishing daily schedules

staffing challenges, religion remains unavoidable in carceral facilities. Chaplaincy work is continually rel evant given the religious expression protections of the First Amend ment and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) as well as the preeminence of ministry baked into American culture. As chaplain and scholar Jessica Van Denend aptly ob served in 2007, “prison is a spiritual hothouse.” 3 Her description conveys the chaos of carceral spaces but also alludes to religion’s capacity, and

surveillance systems, officer hiring incentives, and secular rehabilitative programming increasingly dominate DOC budgets. Across America more broadly, houses of worship report historic levels of public disillusion ment with religion as a whole. 1 And yet, religion and spirituality are abundant in prisons and jails, possessing a rare fluidity in environ ments defined by restriction. As a researcher of religion and govern ment, I spent two years investigating how correctional chaplains navigate this apparent paradox of movement and confinement. After interviewing chaplains of several denominations and religious backgrounds across the country, I found that chaplains can be the most capable correctional administrators of introducing and sustaining life-affirming and dig nifying care. Put simply, chaplains remain enormously powerful in carceral contexts. Chaplaincy across history Since the very first Puritans settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, chaplains have played an instrumental role in the formation of the American correctional landscape.

and long-term disciplinary objec tives. 2 Amid the proliferation of secular psychological counseling and enhanced surveillance technolo gies of the late-nineteenth century, chaplains began to lose their histori cal primacy. Today, chaplains are one part of complex prison and jail administrations, often paperwork laden alongside secular colleagues. However, despite funding and

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8 — September/October 2023 Corrections Today