Sanctifying the expansion of carceral control: Spiritual Supervision in the religious lives of criminalized Latinas

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic data and interviews collected in a Latina/o Pentecostal organization based in Northern California’s Bay Area, this paper analyzes how a religious street ministry that offers rehabilitation services and spiritual aid to criminalized individuals enacts spiritual supervision. Spiritual supervision refers to the process by which religious organizations incentivize middle-class individuals to participate in the construction of a criminalized class of individuals, as part of how they practice their Christian identities. This article analyzes how middle-class congregants supervise the actions and behaviors of criminalized individuals who perform gendered physical labor and participate in public dramatizations of their criminal stigma in exchange for housing, food, and religious participation. Spiritual supervision provides a novel theoretical framework for analyzing how carceral state power spreads through the institutional missions and practices of institutions that aim to rehabilitate but also reinforce racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies that further stigmatize and control criminalized people. As a less visible form of punishment imposed outside formal criminal justice institutions, spiritual supervision illuminates how carceral control operates and affects spiritual and religious landscapes.