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Religion in Prisons in Western Societies: from Duty to a Right

Dates
Dates
Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - 14:00 to 16:00
Location
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11, Open University, MK7 6AA

Pauline Martin Rodriguez is our Masters exchange student from University of Brussels. This event sees Pauline showcasing her research on western prisons and religion.

Once at the heart of prison regime, religion, used as a tool for the moral treatment of convicts in order to reshape their character and make them repent for their transgression, is nowadays a legally guaranteed right for prisoners; religious practice is no longer mandatory and seems to serve a whole new range of spiritual but also social functions for inmates. If this shift has certainly occurred concurrently with the global secularization of Western societies, the links between the place of religion in prisons, the theoretical function assigned to prison sentences and the global political, ideological and economical context also seem to have a noticeable influence on this matter. Starting from the emergence of imprisonment as a criminal sentence in the late 18th century, this presentation will try to expose and analyse those influences, with an emphasis on the role of the rise and importance of liberalism, both in its economical and philosophical acceptations.