The Restorative Prison: Essays on Inmate Peer Ministry and Prosocial Corrections

Drawing on work from inside some of America’s largest and toughest prisons, this book documents an alternative model of "restorative corrections" utilizing the lived experience of successful inmates, fast disrupting traditional models of correctional programming. While research documents a strong desire among those serving time in prison to redeem themselves, inmates often confront a profound lack of opportunity for achieving redemption. In a system that has become obsessively and dysfunctionally punitive, often fewer than 10% of prisoners receive any programming. Incarcerated citizens emerge from prisons in the United States to reoffend at profoundly high rates, with the majority of released prisoners ending up back in prison within five years. In this book, the authors describe a transformative agenda for incentivizing and rewarding good behavior inside prisons, rapidly proving to be a disruptive alternative to mainstream corrections and offering hope for a positive future. The authors’ expertise on the impact of faith-based programs on recidivism reduction and prisoner reentry allows them to delve into the principles behind inmate-led religious services and other prosocial programs―to show how those incarcerated may come to consider their existence as meaningful despite their criminal past and current incarceration. Religious practice is shown to facilitate the kind of transformational "identity work" that leads to desistance that involves a change in worldview and self-concept, and which may lead a prisoner to see and interpret reality in a fundamentally different way. With participation in religion protected by the U.S. Constitution, these model programs are helping prison administrators weather financial challenges while also helping make prisons less punitive, more transparent, and emotionally restorative. This book is essential reading for scholars of corrections, offender reentry, community corrections, and religion and crime, as well as professionals and volunteers involved in correctional counseling and prison ministry. Review ‘In The Restorative Prison, Byron Johnson, Michael Hallett, and Sung Joon Jang show how entrepreneurial, transformative ideas can help to solve one of the most complex problems facing American society today. Masterfully blending behavioral science research and an expert’s knowledge of the criminal justice system, this book delivers both solutions and inspiration.’ Arthur C. Brooks, Professor, Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, and New York Times bestselling author ‘Religion has been entwined with the prison since the birth of the penitentiary two centuries ago, but in this urgent and insurgent new book, Johnson and colleagues argue that faith may now be our only hope for escaping the unholy mess that mass incarceration has become for families and communities in the United States. Although the work is based on sophisticated research, the promised salvation is not to be found in the form of criminological expertise but rather from the lived experience of ‘wounded healers’ – those who have suffered the darkness but found the light. We can only pray they are right.’ Shadd Maruna, Professor, Queen’s University Belfast ‘Under what conditions can religious volunteers be a source of prison reform? What do hope and restoration look like, in a failing, oversized and inhumane prison system? The religious life of prisons is, increasingly, ‘where the action is’. This passionately written and meticulously researched book promotes a positive vision of religiosity, meaning, connectedness and well-being, showing how such practices can, or should, be made possible even in the darkest places.’ Alison Liebling, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Cambridge, UK ‘It is now common to find regular requiems for the role of religion in American life. In the midst of this growing din about the decline of religion as an active social agent in the life of Am