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Doing God’s time: Time, Religion and Reform in Ghanaian Prisons

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Laura RoutleyORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).


Abstract

Based on analysis of interviews with prisoners and prison staff in Ghanaian prisons. This paper steers carceral geographers and others to consider religious understandings of temporality that are in a sense ‘outside time’ and their role in shaping the chronoscapes - understandings of present, past, and future - that inmates and prison staff situate themselves within. Religious transformation is a key basis of prisoner reform in Ghanaian prisons. Religious transformation, in this context dominantly Christian Pentecostal, was productive of understandings of temporality that were non-linear and indeed often plural. Pentecostalism is particularly focused on conversation and the rebirth of adherents and has therefore been seen to have a particular temporarality of rupture, but the chronoscapes that emerge are often more complex than a singular temporal break. If we are to fully understand the temporalities of prisons, and indeed the carceral more broadly, religion in prisons cannot be reduced solely to either a form of discipline or a coping strategy. The paper develops and deepens insights about time in carceral geographies, in particular highlighting how engagements with time are also about engagements with the timeless – with the outside of time.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Routley L

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Political Geography

Year: 2023

Volume: 106

Print publication date: 24/10/2023

Online publication date: 19/08/2023

Acceptance date: 28/07/2023

Date deposited: 11/08/2023

ISSN (print): 0962-6298

ISSN (electronic): 1873-5096

Publisher: Elsevier Ltd

URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102955

DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102955

ePrints DOI: 10.57711/zwdp-ay39

Data Access Statement: The data that has been used is confidential.


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Funding

Funder referenceFunder name
Newcastle University UK internal funding

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