Jailhouse Conversions: Truth or Trope?
Do prisoners really fake religious conversions for personal gain?
Every genre of fiction has its tropes—those repeated plot, character, and setting elements that define the genre.
Science fiction tropes include the evil corporation, a space traveler getting sucked out of the airlock whose body then drifts silently through space, first contact with an alien race, time travel that upsets the time-space continuum, and multi universes.
Stories set in prison also have their tropes.
Today’s post will take a close look at the “jailhouse conversion trope” and answer the question: “Do people really fake conversions to Christianity to gain benefits for themselves?”
Hundreds of books, movies, and television shows have used the same prison tropes so often that we confuse fictional Clichés with reality.
Here are two prison tropes we pretty much all believe:
You have to assert dominance on your first day in prison, or people will attack and take advantage of you for the length of your stay
Inmates won’t discuss the reason they are in prison—or they’ll say they were framed
I’m as guilty as anyone of confusing tropes with truth.
However, after volunteering as a chaplain in a local prison, I am convinced that the Jailhouse Conversion Trope is false.
I first started to question the “Jailhouse Conversion Trope” when I heard women in my Bible study talking about how hard it was to live as a Christian inside prison.
Early in my internship, a woman said to me, “I’ve had everything offered to me in here: women, drugs, contraband. . . and I am staying strong.” This suggested to me that prison was a place of heightened temptation. And why not? It makes sense that a place populated with criminals will be governed by a set of norms more closely approximating the Law of the Jungle than the Law of the LORD.
As I spent more time inside, I heard other comments, too. Women often lamented the “fall” of a friend who had been a faithful attendee of religious services and Bible studies. “She just started listening to the wrong people. I hope I can pull her back into the fold.”
So, I conducted an informal poll with some of the women. I asked them if it was easier or harder to be a Christian on the inside. The results surprised me.
Being identified as a Christian causes other women to target you. There’s not much to do inside, and causing the fall of a faithful woman is pretty entertaining. So non-religious inmates enjoy the challenge of poking at a Christian with various temptations and badgerings.
You’ll have more friends and status if you are not religious. One woman told me, “ You have to be comfortable by yourself. If you need other people to validate you or give you a place in the social scene, it’s going to be hard to be Christian.”
Just as in the rest of America, being a Christian has lost its luster. Time was, being involved in a church was the mark of a good American. Now, it is, at best, neutral but is just as often a net-negative for your reputation. So, there is little incentive for prisoners to fake a conversation.
Prison staff are diverse, tolerant, and professional. Viewers of the movie The Shawshank Redemption may remember Samuel Norton, the seemingly pious prison warden who hung a needlepoint in his office with this corruption of James 5:9: “His Judgment Cometh, and That Right Soon.” The Hypocritical Christian Warden is itself a story-telling trope. Who knows if Samuel Nortons ever existed? And if they did, were they in the majority?
If the Hypocritical Christian Warden ever did exist, the America that fostered him is long gone. Prison staff have a variety of beliefs and do a good job of respecting prisoners’ rights to exercise the religion of their choice, whether it be Wiccan, Paganism, Islam, or Native American. Staff and leadership don’t seem interested in promoting religion. They treat inmates fairly, irrespective of their faith. So, as far as the staff is concerned, there are no special benefits for performing a Christian version of shucking and jiving.
Engaging in secular activities is the path to privileges and favored treatment. No special privileges are granted to inmates for participating in religious services or for mouthing Christian platitudes. Instead, the path to early release is through participation in secular activities like prison jobs, educational programs, and mental health services. Such programs are well-defined and available to all prisoners regardless of religious faith or lack thereof.
It’s a trope
So, no, I don’t think Jailhouse Conversions are commonplace in prison. This doesn’t mean that false conversions don’t exist or that people who practice Christianity inside will not fall prey to recidivism on the outside. Anyone who has been around Christianity for a while knows it is not primarily a moral improvement program. As the bumper sticker says, “Christians aren’t perfect; they’re just forgiven.”
But the idea that many, if not most, religious conversions in prison are false and manipulative is probably just a good story-telling device and not a statistical fact.
Love the blog today. For some reason this popped into my head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7RoP1LKMeM