This panel examines issues of incarceration, law, and abolition from a range of perspectives. One paper advances a legal, moral, and theological argument justifying poor Black mothers’ who break the law to survive and secure quality of life for themselves and their families against unjust social conditions. Another examines religious echoes of plea bargaining in the carceral state. The third considers the role of clergy at two early twentieth-century executions. Take together, the panel asks: how does religion, especially Christianity, undergird ideas about the carceral state and the potential abolition of it?
This paper’s primary concern is to uncover the role of religiously-inflected symbols of guilt in the plea bargain ritual’s production of criminal bodies. It argues, first, that Christian guilt symbolism is interwoven with the raced, gendered, and classed social hierarchy in America, which produces criminal typologies that influence prosecutors’ and judges’ perceptions of defendants’ guilt. Second, it claims that plea bargain rituals are a strategic point in the American carceral system in which this guilt is transferred—or to use more theological language, imputed—to the individual who confesses. The confession that lies at the heart of the plea bargain ritual functions on the one hand, as the defendant’s (often coerced) confirmation of the ‘truth’ of their criminal identities and on the other hand, as an absolution of the carceral state’s complicity in the creation and condemnation of criminal bodies.
Texas hanged James Morris in 1904 and electrocuted Charles Reynolds and five others in 1924. At each execution, Christian clergy played wildly different roles. At the hanging, the preacher led the crowd in prayer and song. At the electrocutions, it's unclear what, exactly, the prison chaplain did, if anything. Between the two executions, Texas changed how and where it conducted executions. How did the changes in law and execution setting affect carceral religious practice? To answer this question, this paper will look at Texas history and capital punishment archives. It will attempt to explore the particulars of the execution days and the clergy’s role in both, with particular attention to the carceral setting, the role of the law, and race. Exploring the history of their presence is paramount to our understanding of the relationship between religion and carceral law, as well as the assurance of prisoners' religious rights.
This paper advances a legal, moral, and theological argument justifying poor Black mothers’ who break the law to survive and secure quality of life for themselves and their families against unjust social conditions. A critical task is to uncover the synergistic and contentious relationship between law and morality that intersect with harmful theologies and punitive philosophies in the context of Black motherhood and the criminalization of survival. In response, I conceptualize a new paradigm called Womanist Abolition that contributes theoretical and methodological interventions pushing forward frontiers in the study of religion. Womanist Abolition consists of legal analyses, moral reappraisals, and an emancipatory theology to undermine carceral systems that limit and foreclose Black mothers’ survival practices. This study’s outcome is the organization Abolitionist Sanctuary. In the final analysis, Womanist Abolition extends an academic study to coalitions of solidarity that expand a faith-based abolitionist movement validating the divinity and dignity of Black mothers as sources of moral integrity and salvation necessary to create a more just and equitable world beyond punishment, policing, and prisons.