Abstract
This study explores the long-term impact on recidivism of the engagement of over 300 women prisoners with humanist, spiritual and religious ways of making meaning during their incarceration. Prison chaplains and community volunteers in the Oregon Department of Corrections offered a diverse range of humanist, spiritual and religious (HSR) events to the women, and 95% of them voluntarily engaged at varied levels with an average participation rate of about 3 h per month. The women who attended most often were motivated to do so by intrinsic or meaning-driven reasons and were more likely to have listened to a religious program on radio or TV in the six months before their incarceration. Controlling for ethnicity, risk of recidivism, participation in other programs (education, substance use, cognitive and work), length of time incarcerated, and infractions during incarceration we found an overall significantly positive impact of HSR involvement on recidivism during the first year after release and over a 13-year follow-up period post prison. The impact was concentrated among the 20% of women who attended most frequently (4 or more hours per month) indicating a dosage and consistency of practice effect. Prison chaplains and volunteers make a valuable contribution to the lives of women in prison and to the correctional system; the pro-social support/modeling and diverse help with meaning-making they offer in prison has a positive influence on the women’s journey of desistance in the community after prison.
Highlights
At a time of growing prison costs and incarceration for women; with little sense of a positive return on investment; there is increasing need for every part of the prison system security; management and programming operations to show a tangible community benefit from its work
We describe in some detail how prison chaplains and volunteers in Oregon are able, at low cost, to provide a great deal of humanist, spiritual and religious programming that reaches almost the entire female population in the prison system
We discovered that these higher levels of HSR dosage and intensity have a significant impact on both short-term and long-term (13 year) post-prison recidivism controlling for a wide range of factors including risk of recidivism, other in-prison program involvement, ethnicity, length of stay and in-prison infractions
Summary
At a time of growing prison costs and incarceration for women; with little sense of a positive return on investment; there is increasing need for every part of the prison system security; management and programming operations to show a tangible community benefit from its work. Religions 2018, 9, 171 followed the women for up to 13 years post release we present our findings on the impact of that engagement on recidivism In his acclaimed book, A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes what it means to live in a modern secular democracy. People who are spiritual retain a sense of God, the Divine, or Transcendence beyond human life, but find it difficult to relate to or derive meaning within the context of the sources and practices of an organized religion (Taylor 2007). Researchers who study the impact of religion on well-being have found it helpful to distinguish spirituality from religion in this way (Hill and Pargament 2013; Idler et al 2003), and Jang and Franzen (2013) have urged criminologists to add these kinds of distinctions to their study of religion and crime We call these three paths of meaning-making: humanist; spiritual; and religious or HSR for short. The first amendment against governmental establishment or restriction of religion calls prison chaplains to some very skillful and nuanced work; they must foster every prisoner’s unique journey of meaning-making without using their government position to favor their own or any particular version of humanism, spirituality or religion (O’Connor et al 2006)
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