Joshua Dubler

Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. At the same time, many religious ideas and practices oppose mass incarceration. This project intends to substantiate these two claims and to explore the tension between them. Joshua Dubler, a scholar of American religious cultures who uses ethnographic methods, together with Vincent Lloyd, a scholar of religion and politics who draws on political theory, aim to reframe the exponential prison growth of the last forty years. While much scholarly attention has focused on the roles of economics, politics, and race in explaining prison growth, this project demonstrates the important role that religion has also played, as well as the ways that religion is entangled with these other factors. How might “justice” and “law” function as secularized theological concepts, and how have these terms been creatively reappropriated in the religious movements of incarcerated individuals? By looking behind prison walls, inside institutions of worship, and at the language of political elites, this research aims to explicate the peculiar nexus of religious and political ideas that has and continues to enable mass incarceration, and it will harvest religious resources that can make the criminal justice system more just. Dubler and Lloyd will examine the robust religious idioms used in nineteenth-century movements for the abolition of slavery, and will puzzle over why the language of prison reform has, so far, been thoroughly secularist. The collaborators, who from 2012-2014 served as facilitators of a Rochester-Cornell-Syracuse working group addressing these issues, will also conduct a study of religion in recent prison strikes—including the largest prison strikes in US history in California in 2013 and in Georgia in 2010—as a capstone to their project, with the product of this collaboration being a co-authored book. Award period: July 1, 2015 through December 31, 2016