Doing God's time: Time, religion and reform in Ghanaian prisons

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.