Religion and Misconduct in “Angola” Prison: Conversion, Congregational Participation, Religiosity, and Self-Identities^*

* An early version was presented at the 2015 Annual Meetings of the American Society of Criminology, Washington, DC.

Abstract

Prior research tends to find an inverse relationship between inmates’ religion and misconduct in prison, but this relationship has lacked empirical explanation. We therefore propose the religion-misconduct relationship is mediated by inmates’ identity transformation on existential, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. To test the mediation, we conducted a survey of inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (a.k.a. “Angola”). Controlling for inmates’ sociodemographic and criminal backgrounds, we estimated a latent-variable structural equation model of disciplinary convictions. Results showed that inmates’ religious conversion and, to a lesser extent, religiosity itself were positively related to existential and cognitive transformations as well as a “crystallization of discontent,” which were in turn associated with two types of emotional transformation in the expected direction. The crystallization of discontent and transformation in negative affect were related to disciplinary convictions as hypothesized, and their mediation of the effects of conversion and religiosity on misconduct were found to be significant.

Keywords:

• religion
• misconduct
• “Angola” prison
• conversion
• identity transformation

Notes

* An early version was presented at the 2015 Annual Meetings of the American Society of Criminology, Washington, DC.

¹ Qualitative interviews we conducted with over 100 inmates at Angola illuminate the timing of religious conversion and add valuable context to our cross-sectional survey data. While each individual’s experience is of course unique, a majority of those inmates reporting religious conversion date the experience to a “rock bottom” moment, such as a point shortly after their arrest, conviction, or arrival at Angola.

² While we conceptualize religious conversion as process in this paper, interview narratives revealed a certain tension between conversions as momentary decisions and the ongoing process of identity transformation through exposure to further spiritual influences, reflecting rival paradigms of religious conversion in both empirical studies (Gooren, 2010; Rambo, 1993) and theological treatments (McKnight, 2002; Peace, 2004).

³ Although this study, being cross-sectional, cannot address whether exposure to religion leads to cognitive transformation or vice versa, we propose the former causation for the religion-transformation relationship based on our data from interviews. As in Giordano et al.’s (2002) research, oftentimes it appears based on our interview data that exposure to the “hooks” of faith, in fact, often precedes “openness to change.” Interviewees frequently described exposure to some type of “hook for change” that prompted their openness to conversion, whether the influence of a cellmate, a Bible available in the parish jail, or their relationship with a chaplain or religious volunteer. Conversion and, particularly, its narratives then contribute to cognitive transformation. Definitive answers to the question about causal ordering, however, require more research.

⁴ All endogenous variables were regressed on the exogenous variables, but structural paths from the latter (except the three variables of religiousness) to the former are not shown in the diagram to avoid visual clutter.

⁵ Both Angola’s congregations and its seminary flourished under longtime warden Burl Cain, although the congregations long preceded Cain’s two-decade tenure. Cain introduced seminary instruction into the prison only after Congressional revocation of Pell Grant eligibility for convicted felons negatively affected Angola. Cain leveraged his unusual degree of autonomy to formalize subsequently the ministry of its seminary graduates into Angola’s unique “Inmate Minister” program.

⁶ The three items not used are: (1) I have a new identity that replaces the label of prisoner; (2) My experience of imprisonment led me to find new meaning and purpose in life; and (3) I have a sense of control over an unknown future. A supplemental analysis conducted later, however, revealed that including all or any of these items in the measure of religious conversion did not change overall results (complete results are available upon request).

⁷ Little’s (1988) MCAR test indicated that our data were not missing completely at random (χ² = 10140.238, d.f. = 8545, p = .000). While we cannot tell whether our data are missing at random (MAR) or missing not at random (MNAR) because there is no diagnostic procedure for the determination, Mplus’ FIML “provides maximum likelihood estimation under MCAR, MAR, and MNAR” (Muthén & Muthén, 1998–2012, p. 387).

⁸ Compared to 799 inmates excluded from the analysis, those in the final sample were, on average, older (45.098 vs. 43.513), more educated (4.590 vs. 4.182), and less criminal in terms of previous arrest (2.461 vs. 2.810), incarceration (1.782 vs. 2.175), and conviction for property (1.558 vs. 1.703) and drug offenses (1.570 vs. 2.022), whereas they were serving longer sentences (5.232 vs. 4.084) and more likely to have a conviction for a violent offense (.913 vs. .817). Interestingly, however, we found no significant mean difference in disciplinary convictions over the 2-year period between inmates who were at Angola for two or more years and those for less than two years (1.869 vs. 1.904, p = .579). In addition, the former inmates tended to score higher on religious service attendance, conversion, cognitive and existential identities, feared self, positive emotional identity of being hopeful but lower on negative emotional identity of being depressed than the latter (complete results available upon request).

⁹ For an easier distinction between significant and non-significant coefficients, a thick line was used for the former.

¹⁰ Our interviews with inmates provided a potential explanation for the observed difference: participants in congregations were more religious than non-participants, but less so than the converts. One seminary graduate attributed some inmates’ congregational participation to the desire for the material benefits offered to congregations by outside religious volunteers: “And we love to come when we have guests, because guests bring food, guests bring shirts, guests bring this … so really, our whole motive all the way wrong for the Angola church.” Another seminary graduate went so far as to call some of what transpires within Angola churches “a dog and pony show.” Although active in their own religious beliefs, these inmates recognize the mixed motives of their peers among Angola’s congregations (Clear et al., 2000).

¹¹ For one seminary graduate, purpose, as understood through relationship with his Creator, was a touchstone of enduring worth tied to a new self-understanding:

“You know, I’ve got a purpose, you know. I may not be going home, but I have a purpose. I still have a purpose, I still can serve a purpose here, you know, while I’m here. I can still serve a purpose for my family, you know. I still communicate with my family, you know, to let them know who I am, the different me, the new me. … Knowing you have a relationship with the Creator, he created me for a purpose, he made me for a purpose. So what is my purpose? So you begin to ask yourself questions, and at that point, you can answer the question.”

According to him, this identity transformation did not occur in a vacuum nor randomly, but the process began with his exposure to “a hook for change” (Giordano et al., 2002):

“Most guys, when I come in here, they didn’t have a purpose. It was just like an institution of failure, an institution of lies. They didn’t have no purpose in life, they didn’t have no goals in life, so once you go through Bible college, it gives you that. It gives you something to sort of to grow, sort of to latch onto, so you can be able to start. It’s a ladder, like, it’s a process.”

¹² The larger correlation between cognitive transformation and crystallization of discontent (r = .677) than the other two correlations involving existential transformation (r = .388 and .287) might indicate that cognitive transformation and crystallization of discontent, both tapping the domain of cognition, share conceptually more in common than existential transformation, which is cognitive in part but more than human cognition in the sense that it concerns self-transcendent, ultimate meaning and purpose in life (Emmons, 1999; Frankl, 1946/1984; Tillich, 1957).

¹³ Individual religiosity also had significant indirect effect on prison misconduct via existential transformation and transformation in negative affect, if one-tailed test was applied (−.011, S.E. = .006; β = −.007, S.E. = .004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sung Joon Jang

Sung Joon Jang is a research professor of Criminology and Co-director of Program on Prosocial Behavior at the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University. His research on the effects of religion, family, school, and peers on crime and drug use has appeared in various journals of criminology and sociology. Jang is leading a series of studies on the process of identity transformation among inmates participating in a prison-based seminary and the effect of mentoring program on positive youth development and recidivism among juvenile offenders.

Byron R. Johnson

Byron R. Johnson is a distinguished professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University. He is the founding director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion. His newest books are The Angola prison seminary (Routledge, 2016) and The quest for purpose: The collegiate search for a meaningful life (SUNY Press, 2017).

Joshua Hays

Joshua Hays is a research associate for Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. His research focuses on the influence of religion on desistance from crime understood through qualitative prison inmate ethnography.

Michael Hallett

Michael Hallett is a professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of North Florida. His work has appeared in numerous books and journals including Punishment & Society, Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, Critical Criminology, and others. Hallett received the Gandhi, King, Ikeda Award from Morehouse College for his book Private prisons in America: A critical race perspective (University of Illinois Press). Hallett has been principal investigator on grants from the US Department of Justice, Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, Jesse Ball DuPont Foundation, and several other organizations.

Grant Duwe

Grant Duwe is the director of Research for the Minnesota Department of Corrections, where he forecasts the state’s prison population, conducts program evaluations and research studies, and develops risk assessment instruments. His work has recently been published in Criminal Justice and Behavior, Criminology & Public Policy, and Criminal Justice Policy Review. He is currently a non-resident scholar with Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion and a visiting fellow with the Bureau of Justice Statistics.