Faith-based prison units
Making prisons more human and punishment more humane.
My Brother’s Keeper was the first major study of a global phenomenon: faith-based units in prison. Exploring the roots of these units in South America, it explains why the Prison Service of England and Wales set up the first Christian-based unit in the Western world at the end of the twentieth century – and their rapid expansion. It also explains how, at exactly the same time, the United States introduced Christian-based units – and why these were complemented by interfaith and multifaith initiatives. At the heart of My Brother’s Keeper is an interior account of life inside four Christian-based prison units in England, drawing on the findings of a detailed evaluation conducted by the authors for the Home Office, Prison Service and Kainos Community between 2000 and 2001, including an updated reconviction study. It is an authoritative account of an innovative programme. Its analysis of what works and what doesn’t in faith-based units around the world makes My Brother’s Keeper a valuable roadmap for all who care about improving prison conditions. It presents a vision of justice that is not just concerned with building more prisons but with rebuilding more prisoners.
Whereas some studies of faith-based programmes are either purely empirical (focusing solely on recidivism rates, programme participation etc.) or theological (focusing on conversion, prisoner testimony regarding personal spiritual experiences etc.), My Brother’s Keeper aims to combine fieldwork, policy engagement, criminology, legal analysis, and theology into one coherent account. It provides a relational account of what faith – especially the Christian faith – actually does in prison settings; how it creates meaning, belonging, and moral accountability and seeks to integrate theology, criminology, and desistance theory. It also reframes faith-based work in prisons as being of public value rather than purely personal piety and challenges secular assumptions regarding rehabilitation and neutrality. It also demonstrates that faith communities generate alternative moral worlds and seeks to blend empirical engagement and theological insight.
My Brother’s Keeper shows that when faith-based programmes succeed, they do so because they create microcommunities inside prison with pro-social norms, identities and moral expectations different from the rest of the prison. Often, belonging to a moral community is crucial for desistance. Faith-based units have the effect of treating prison space as a socially transformative environment. In this way, My Brother’s Keeper goes beyond asking “does they reduce reoffending?” to consider how certain faith communities repattern behaviour through belonging, accountability, and a shared narrative. In this sense, it is not going too far to say that My Brother’s Keeper shows how biblical ideas about justice can illuminate contemporary prison practice. Parallels can be drawn between biblical notions of repentance, atonement, and restitution and modern processes of rehabilitation and desistance.
In this way, My Brother’s Keeper does not simply evaluate whether such programmes “work.” Instead, it reframes the entire conversation about faith, rehabilitation, and criminal justice through a distinctive set of insights that combine criminology, theology, and Relational Justice. It shows how faith-based programmes can embody insights about human change, communal belonging, and moral restoration that contemporary criminology often overlooks.
Faith-based prison programmes can be a vital resource for building stronger, more connected, and more hopeful communities both inside prison and beyond it.
My Brother’s Keeper also engages closely with the practical realities of prison systems, examining programme delivery, institutional culture, and the challenges of implementation, while also drawing on criminological theory to illuminate what makes faith-based interventions effective. A key theme is that faith traditions – with the emphasis here being on Christianity – carry rich moral languages. Repentance, forgiveness, confession and redemption give prisoners a meaningful way to name wrongdoing, take responsibility, and initiate repair. This enables prisoners to move beyond denial or shame toward constructive moral action. Such initiatives align naturally with ideas about Relational Justice since they emphasise how pro-social relationships – modelled most notably by free-world volunteers – can help to put right what has gone wrong in prisoners’ past relationships. In this way, such programmes support broader goals of rehabilitation and reintegration by fostering accountability, inspiring moral growth, and supporting lasting change in the lives of offenders. In sum, faith-based prison programmes can be a vital resource for building stronger, more connected, and more hopeful communities both inside prison and beyond it.
Parts of My Brother’s Keeper draw on Kainos Community in Prisons: Report of an Evaluation that I headed for the Home Office and HM Prison Service.
Some of the empirical findings regarding the impact of a religious intervention on prisoners’ religiosity can be found in Measuring religion in prisons: Offenders’ beliefs and attitudes along with implications for how the Prison Service could better sustain spirituality among the imprisoned.
Shorter summaries of this work can be found in my Keeping faith in prisons: Evaluating the policy and practice of faith-based units and Believing in Prisons: Religious-based special units along with Faith-based units in prisons: International practice and European implications.
For an account of the prison that started it all – APAC in Brazil – read Where Love Is Not A Luxury (with Penelope Lee).
The Christian faith particularly gives prisoners & moral narrative & through which they can reinterpret their identity and past behaviour
As described in My Brother’s Keeper, and my other related work, the Christian faith particularly gives prisoners a moral narrative through which they can reinterpret their identity and past behaviour. Religious conversion is not merely a matter of emotional change but a reframing of the self that allows entry into a morally ordered community. This in turn entails a recognition of accountability which provides a source of meaning for moral transformation. This approach challenges secular rehabilitation models that treat the self as purely autonomous, arguing instead for identity change grounded in relational and transcendent reference points.
Along with my broader work set out in the Relational Justice project and the Relational Justice Bulletin, My Brother’s Keeper challenges the assumption that secular rehabilitation is morally neutral. In fact, all justice systems rely on implicit moral frameworks. Unfortunately, these often fail to give offenders sufficiently robust resources for responsibility, forgiveness, or repair. By contrast, faith-based programmes make their moral commitments explicit and this a transparency can help prisoners to engage more deeply with questions of meaning, responsibility, and change. The question then becomes not – as often was the case in political interventions and in national press reporting of faith-based units – one of “religion versus neutrality” but of which moral framework best supports relational repair.
Reflections on faith-based programmes from a Christian perspective can be found in my article Religious Interventions In Prisons.
In Beatitudes Behind Bars: Faith-Based Therapeutic Communities in Prisons I explain the overwhelming dominance of Christianity within faith-based units. Among other reasons this reflects distinctively Christian concerns for prisoners as such; human decency; justice; relationships and spiritual transformation.