Abstract
Addressing a significant gap in the knowledge of female Muslim prisoners’ religiosity, this paper describes and explains the gendered impact of incarceration on the religiosity of Muslim female and male offenders. Based on quantitative and qualitative data collected in ten prisons, including a male and female prison in England and a male and female prison in Switzerland, the authors show that prison tends to intensify the religiosity of Muslim men and reduce the religiosity of Muslim women. In explanation of this, the authors argue that, at the individual level, the feelings of guilt at the absence of family, the absence of high-status religious forms of gender and feelings of trauma and victimhood impact negatively on Muslim female offenders’ religiosity. At the institutional level, female Muslim prisoners, being a small minority, do not mobilise a powerful shared religious identity and chaplaincy provision—including provision of basic religious services—is patchier for Muslim women than it is for men and often does not take into account the specific needs of female prisoners.
Highlights
Since the pioneering sociological studies of James Beckford and Sophie Gilliat-Ray on religion in prison (Beckford et al 1998), the study of religion in prison has become a distinct field in the sociology of religion
Muslim men and women collected in two prisons, this contribution articulates a comparative analysis of the type of religious changes experienced by Muslim prisoners during their incarceration
The results presented in this article are partial results from an independently funded international research program entitled Understanding Conversion to Islam in Prison (UCIP), conducted between 2018–2020
Summary
Since the pioneering sociological studies of James Beckford and Sophie Gilliat-Ray on religion in prison (Beckford et al 1998), the study of religion in prison has become a distinct field in the sociology of religion. Rostaing (2017) identified three ideal-typical processes that hinder the knowledge and visibility of women in prison She noted that the principle of formal equality between prisoners led to the negation of differences between incarcerated men and women. She highlighted the androcentrism which, due to the numerical superiority of male prisoners, prioritizes the study of the general to the detriment of the individual. She stated that penological studies of women prisoners are often reduced to studies on women and gender, rather than making a contribution to prisons’ research more generally.
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