Gendered Religion in Prison? Comparing Imprisoned Men and Women's Expressed Religiosity in Switzerland

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Notes

¹See Becci et al. 2011.

²In the present work, we consider gender as a socially constructed and hierarchized order supposing a direct link between human sexual and cultural differences. As Cornwall writes, it can be “understood as a system of relations, a social product constantly negotiated and redefined that both constrains and provides opportunity for action” (253).

³By religiosity, we refer to the ways in which individuals express (discursively and practically) their personal religious beliefs and worldviews.

⁴See Spradley 1979.

⁵Men's prisons make up the overwhelming majority of prisons in Switzerland (about 94%).

⁶In Switzerland, large prisons now have only single cells and a high security section and have only a few collective cells. Neither prison K nor prison D was overcrowded at the time of our fieldwork.

⁷On the history and functions of women's correction houses in Switzerland cf. among others Jacquier and Vuille 2008.

⁸See Bovay et al. 2008; Becci and Bovay 2009.

⁹Four of the five women and nine of the twelve men were Swiss nationals. The average age of men was 41.8 and of women, 42.2. Six fathers and two mothers were among the interviewees.

¹⁰See Clarke 2005.

¹¹See Gee 2005.

¹²Recent research has shown a general trend toward distanciation from institutional religion (Stolz, Könneman, Schneuwly Purdie et al. 2011) and a “fuzzy fidelity” to (Voas 2009; Storm 2010) Christian tradition. More than half of the Swiss are thus neither religious nor atheists. They believe in something they cannot really define, sometimes go to church or recite a small prayer, but religion plays no specific role in their self-identity.

¹³The prison institution itself attributes some importance to the Bible. It is often the only book inmates have available to them when they are in isolation or at the very beginning of the pre-trial period. The Koran is also distributed upon request. For example, prison K offers Bible reading circles organized, as the director told us, by the Salvation Army on Saturday mornings. These circles, although initially meant for the Spanish-speaking women, are also attended by inmates who want “to better understand the Bible” (Diana).

¹⁴See also Becci 2011.

¹⁵The chaplains interviewed confirmed that they prayed more frequently and intimately with imprisoned women than with men.

¹⁶We did indeed observe that some inmates eagerly waited to drink the remaining sips once the celebration was over.

¹⁷Muslims represented 27% of the inmate population at the time of our research in prison D.

¹⁸Total institutions according to Erving Goffmann organize in their spaces all aspects of inmates' lives and erect high barriers to social intercourse with the outside world. This does not mean that all prisons are the same, but that, in all prisons as total institutions, persons undergo strong restrictions and determinations of their movements and of their social, intellectual, and sexual relations.

¹⁹See Achermann and Hostettler for a critical perspective on such institutions in Switzerland.

²⁰Numerous authors have demonstrated that, paradoxically, the “feminization of prisons simply reinforces the patriarchal status quo” (Magehoon 474). Finding out whether this is the case in the analyzed prison was not the aim of our research and will hence be left open here.