Learning to Live: Social Death, Redemptive Practices, and Theological Education in a Women's Prison Público
Green, Rachelle (Summer 2019)
Abstract
In 2009, the Certificate in Theological Studies program (Theology) began as the first academic theological program for women in prison. The program promoted the formation of leadership skills, self-dignity, and social awareness amidst a US criminal punishment system that is fundamentally intertwined in and sustained by the processes and practices of social death. Social death is the state or condition of not being accepted and treated as fully human and its practices function toward the calculated and purposeful destruction of human dignity. This dissertation explores the lives of students in the Theology program in an attempt to understand what good theological education is in a prison steeped in social death practices.
Student experiences suggest that ultimately, the good of theological education in prison rests in its ability to participate in God’s work of redeeming life in the presence of social death. This project shows how critical theological education engaged in a prison classroom that embraces redemptive practices transforms contexts of social death into contexts that value and sustain human life. The redemptive practices of coming together, considering one another, choosing names, critical questioning, and creating theology are just some of the many practices that seek to redeem life in prison. These practices form the substance of redemptive pedagogy that can in turn shape a redemptive community.
I contend that redemptive practices free students from the totalizing effects of social death and cultivate skills for analyzing and responding to the systems that oppress them. In a prison classroom, redemptive practices are political because they cultivate critical agency and support beliefs in the ability of incarcerated students to be positive agents in their own healing and futuring. Redemptive practices are the saving work in critical theological education in prison ushering in God’s redemptive reality. The good of theological education in prison and for the future is in its willingness to conceive of itself as a life-saving practice opening its doors to a wider, more diverse, and more expansive group of human beings committed to learning so they might live.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Theology and Living Dead 1
Theological Education in Prison 5
Social Death and Living Dead in a Women’s Prison 15
Methodology: With Ears to Hear Incarcerated Students 21
The Significance of Living Dead and the Politics of Goodness 38
2. Living Dead: The Psychosocial Context of Theological Education in Prison 41
Social Death 44
Survival 60
A Good Life 74
Conclusion 83
3. Fallen Women: Myths that Shape Female Carceral Practices 86
Dichotomous Narratives 89
Fallenness in Nineteenth-Century Protestant Thought 97
Constructing Myths of The Criminal Woman 106
Shifting Images 113
Conclusion 118
4. Prison Practices: Punishment and Reform in the First Women’s Prisons 121
In the Beginning 122
Rise of Women’s Reformatories 134
Progressive Reformers and New Models of Correction 145
Custodial Institutions & Practices of Punishment 149
Merging Institutions, Merging Myths 156
Conclusion 158
5. Redeeming Life: Redemptive Practices and Theological Education 160
Practices 166
Prison Practice and Pedagogy 168
Redemption and Prison Theology 173
Redemptive Practices 180
Types of Redemptive Practices in the Prison Theology Classroom 187
The Politics of Theological Education in Prison 202
Conclusion 207
6. Learning to Live: Toward a Redemptive Theological Education 209
Redemptive Theological Education and Implications for “Theology” 212
A Redemptive Telos for the Future of Theological Education 218
Appendix: Program Description & Qualitative Method 222
Bibliography 227
About this Dissertation
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