Abstract
Based on analysis of interviews with prisoners and prison staff in Ghanaian prisons. This paper steers carceral geographers and others to consider religious understandings of temporality that are in a sense ‘outside time’ and their role in shaping the chronoscapes - understandings of present, past, and future - that inmates and prison staff situate themselves within. Religious transformation, heavily influence by Pentecostal Christian practices, is a key basis of prisoner reform in Ghanaian prisons. This article shows that this religious transformation is productive of understandings of temporality that are both non-linear and plural. Pentecostalism is particularly focused on conversation and the rebirth of adherents and has therefore been seen to have a particular temporality of rupture, but the chronoscapes that emerge are often more complex than a singular temporal break. If we are to fully understand the temporalities of prisons, and indeed the carceral more broadly, religion in prisons cannot be reduced solely to either a form of discipline or a coping strategy. The paper develops and deepens insights about time in carceral geographies, in particular highlighting how engagements with time are also about engagements with the timeless – with the outside of time.
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