"This book is highly valuable as an experience that helps readers build a mental schema of some of the women inmates’ realities of incarceration."

 "Ellis’ piercing study, beautifully written, vividly demonstrates the double-edged sword of religion in prison – its capacity to liberate and its equal power to subjugate."
 

"Ellis’ contributions are significant to a plethora of academic fields, while her writing style is easily digestible as she recalls the lived experiences of the women at Mapleside Prison."

"Ellis develops three-dimensional, nuanced portrayals of the interiority of women’s lives, recognizing women’s full and complex humanity in ways neither the carceral nor religious discourses that are the object of her study do. Ellis is an exceptionally skilled, ethical, and transparent ethnographer. Her methodological appendix should be required reading in sociological research methods classes."

"Accessible and well-written, In This Place Called Prison will engage not only students of sociology and carceral studies, but scholars of lived religion, gender and sexuality, and political theology, as well."

"This is an excellent book that is easily accessible, thought provoking, and sheds light on an important, but under studied, topic."

"Ellis switches brilliantly between major structural analysis that contextualizes and personal stories that tell the cases of particular women. She is indeed interested most of all in the personal transformation that incarcerated women undergo and in the role that religion can play here."

"By showing how religion in prison is both a resource and a power, as well as a source of power and control, Ellis makes an original and relevant contribution to debates in the sociology of religion and prison sociology."

 "This book is a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary study of the law, and it would make a powerful contribution to conversations in sociology, philosophy, ethics, political science, religion, and gender studies classrooms—as well as to scholarly research agendas."

"Ellis is a skilled and empathetic ethnographer. . .The women about whom she writes are complex people navigating a world of very limited choices."
 

“In This Place Called Prison: Women’s Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment is an ethnographic account of religious life in a women’s prison, pseudonymously called Mapleside, on the east coast of the United States. Through interviews with Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish incarcerated women; religious program volunteers; and prison staff and chaplains, sociologist Rachel Ellis investigates how religion offers incarcerated women tools both to resist and yield to carceral power.”

“This is long overdue, as prisons are exceptionally religious places, in origin and . . .   in daily practice as funding for state-organized secular activities and programs decline. The framework developed in the book arose from a highly systematic and grounded approach to analysis, and so the direction it takes is original, illuminating, and convincing.”

Rachel Ellis is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland.

Contents

Introduction
1. Thou Shalt Not: A Day in Prison 
2. Let There Be Light: Religious Life Behind Bars 
3. The Lord Is My Shepherd: Protestant Messages
of God’s Redemptive Plan 
4. Blessed Is The Fruit Of Thy Womb: Gender,
Religion, and Ideologies of the Family 
5. For Many Are Called, But Few Are Chosen:
Status and Dignity in the Prison Church 
Conclusion 
Epilogue: Out of the House of Bondage 

Acknowledgments 
Methodological Appendix 
Notes 
References 
Index