Sanctifying the expansion of carceral control: Spiritual Supervision in the religious lives of criminalized Latinas
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520925328 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Melissa Guzman |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
Sanctifying the expansion
2020, Vol. 22(5) 681–702
! The Author (s) 2020
of carceral control:
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520925328
Spiritual Supervision in
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
the religious lives of
criminalized Latinas
Melissa Guzman
San Francisco State University, USA
Abstract
Drawing from ethnographic data and interviews collected in a Latina/o Pentecostal
organization based in Northern California’s Bay Area, this paper analyzes how a reli-
gious street ministry that offers rehabilitation services and spiritual aid to criminalized
individuals enacts spiritual supervision. Spiritual supervision refers to the process by which
religious organizations incentivize middle-class individuals to participate in the con-
struction of a criminalized class of individuals, as part of how they practice their
Christian identities. This article analyzes how middle-class congregants supervise the
actions and behaviors of criminalized individuals who perform gendered physical labor
and participate in public dramatizations of their criminal stigma in exchange for housing,
food, and religious participation. Spiritual supervision provides a novel theoretical
framework for analyzing how carceral state power spreads through the institutional
missions and practices of institutions that aim to rehabilitate but also reinforce racial-
ized, gendered, and classed hierarchies that further stigmatize and control criminalized
people. As a less visible form of punishment imposed outside formal criminal justice
institutions, spiritual supervision illuminates how carceral control operates and affects
spiritual and religious landscapes.
Keywords
carceral citizenship, collateral consequences, gender, Latinas, mass imprisonment,
racism, re-entry, rehabilitation, religion, supervision
Corresponding author:
Melissa Guzman, Department of Latina/Latino Studies, San Francisco State University, Ethnic Studies &
Psychology 103, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132-1722, USA.
Email: mguz@sfsu.edu
682
Punishment & Society 22(5)
Introduction
Redeemed Life (RL) is a Pentecostal street ministry whose mission is to build new
churches and drug rehabilitation homes throughout the inner cities of the world
and bring the Gospel to the downtrodden and the forgotten.1 With over 350 reha-
bilitation homes and 210 churches, RL envisions itself as an army who follows the
Word of God to equip, train, and empower others to engage in spiritual warfare
against the gang violence, drug abuse, and moral vice that plagues inner cities. In
addition to targeting individuals with drug and alcohol dependencies, this organi-
zation offers rehabilitative services to men and women who have been previously
incarcerated, gang affiliated, or involved in sex work. Based on ethnographic data
collected in a Northern California chapter of RL, this paper uncovers how differ-
ent actors within this religious organization enact spiritual supervision. I define
spiritual supervision as the process by which religious organizations incentivize
middle-class congregants to participate in the construction of a criminal class
through the paternalistic management of criminalized congregants’ spiritual
agency (or people’s ability to decide how, when, and to what extent they can
participate in the spiritual practices of their religious communities). Spiritual
supervision provides a new conceptual framework for analyzing how institutions
outside of traditional criminal justice settings legitimate and reproduce their own
forms of gendered, classed, and racial inequalities.
In the past decade, scholars have expanded conventional theoretical analyses of
contemporary punishment, asking how punishment is defined and exercised
beyond formal legal structures and punitive institutions (Hannah-Moffat and
Lynch, 2012). For instance, Beckett and Murakawa’s (2012) analyses of “the
shadow carceral state” shows how penal power operates through subtle and less
visible processes that lead institutions like immigration and family courts, civil
detention facilities, and county clerk offices to reinforce new pathways to punish-
ment. In this vein, scholars have examined how “criminal justice adjacencies” or
institutions operating outside the formal criminal justice system like schools, hos-
pitals, and welfare offices can mimic the punitive features of criminal justice appa-
ratuses, for instance, by developing their own cultural ideologies about race and
punishment that echo those operating within formal criminal justice settings (Van
Cleve and Mayes, 2015: 425). The rehabilitative and recovery services offered to
criminalized individuals within religious organizations like RL may not be official-
ly considered or labeled as “punishment.” However, the framework of spiritual
supervision allows scholars to trace how community institutions like RL generate
their own novel, yet consequential gendered, racialized, and classed dynamics of
surveillance, control, and supervision (Beckett and Murakawa, 2012; Goodkind,
2009; Haney, 2010; Hansen, 2018; McCorkel, 2013; McKim, 2008).
This article examines how religious organizations contend with becoming
increasingly involved in providing therapeutic services for criminalized people,
in an era where punishment has extended into alternative, hybrid environments
that provide “carceralized aid” to economically marginalized communities
Guzman
683
(Lara-Milla´n and Gonzalez Van Cleve, 2017; Miller, 2014; Van Cleve and Mayes,
2015). I employ spiritual supervision to theorize how religious organizations and
street ministries that provide services to criminalized communities function under
the “shadow carceral state” by reinforcing their own racialized, gendered, and
classed cultural logics about criminality and rehabilitation (Beckett and
Murakawa, 2012). While religious street ministries may not be officially recognized
penal landscapes, I show how religious institutions and their actors employ spir-
itual supervision to construct a “stigmatized caste” (Alexander, 2010) of individ-
uals with limited access to spiritual agency. Moreover, partaking in spiritual
supervision is how middle-class congregants see themselves as fulfilling RL’s insti-
tutional mission to save inner cities and consequently, how they accomplish and
perform their own Christian identities.
I employ spiritual supervision as a conceptual framework to analyze how reli-
gious organizations incentivize middle-class individuals with no previous criminal
backgrounds to participate in the management of criminalized congregants’ spir-
itual agency in three ways. One, by advancing institutional missions that rely on
racialized discourses about inner city violence and criminality. Second, by incor-
porating middle-class congregants into authority and leadership positions through
giving them power to supervise the actions and narratives of criminalized congre-
gants and extract gendered physical labor (i.e. expecting women to perform child-
care, cleaning, and cooking duties, and men to collect garbage and manage the
parking lot outside the building). Third, by incentivizing leaders and regular
church members to participate in public degradation ceremonies (Garfinkel,
1956) that highlight criminalized congregants’ past “depravities” and contacts
with the criminal justice system, as part of identifying a criminal class within the
church. My analytical framework of spiritual supervision advances a nuanced
understanding of how religious organizations rehabilitate criminalized individuals
by extracting a spiritual debt from them by limiting their spiritual agency, demand-
ing gendered physical labor, and through publicly performing a stigmatized and
depraved identity in exchange for shelter and spiritual aid (Gustafson, 2013).
Research on mass imprisonment and carceral control has documented how
social services for criminalized individuals are increasingly provided through con-
tact with the criminal justice system (Comfort, 2007). In this context, various
therapeutic and rehabilitative programs have emerged both within and outside
punitive institutions, including drug dependency treatment in prisons (Haney,
2010, McCorkel, 2013); religious “self-help” programs for incarcerated women
(Ellis, 2018); reentry programs in post-release supervised settings (Gurusami,
2018; McKim, 2008; Miller, 2014); remedial education in alternative schools
(Lopez-Aguado, 2016, Rios, 2011); and wraparound services for Latinas on pro-
bation (Flores, 2016). Within this body of work, feminist scholars of punishment
have analyzed how rehabilitative programs inevitably reproduce gendered and
racialized presumptions of criminalized individuals as “disordered,” unfit parents,
welfare abusers, and criminally dependent (Caputo, 2014; Goodkind, 2009;
Haney, 2010; Hannah-Moffat, 2001; McCorkel, 2013; McKim, 2008; Sered and
684
Punishment & Society 22(5)
Norton-Hawk, 2014). As Ellis (2018) argues, incarcerated women’s ability to per-
form “religious selves” is limited and constrained, vis-a`-vis the normative racial-
ized, classed, and gendered discourses promoted by the religious rehabilitative
programs available to them in prison (187).
Scholarship on gendered control and punishment suggests that alternatives-to-
prison programs for women, and in particular, those focused on helping women
transform their moral selves, inevitably reinforce traditional criminal justice goals
of surveillance, incapacitation, and punitive discipline (Goodkind, 2009; Hannah-
Moffat, 2001; McCorkel,...
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