Abstract
Debates about the aims and social functions of the current prison systems in Europe have emerged cyclically in political arenas and the mass media. The range of opinions is extremely wide, from the criticism of prisons as inhuman and even engendering criminality and the request to abolish them, to the opposite: the claim that prisons are velveted shelters for criminals and need to be harshened. Social scientific research confirms that prisons and their aims of containment and rehabilitation are highly contested fields. Recently, the contestations have become increasingly related to religion and religious diversity. This chapter systematizes the results in a comparative perspective by clarifying the locations where religious diversity is present and distinguishing them analytically. It finally introduces the logic of the structure of the book.
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- 1.
The details on this case are in Beckford’s chapter following the introduction.
- 2.
See Lentin and Titley 2012 for a critical reflection on the tensions around the notion of multiculturalism.
- 3.
A varying number of scientists working on this topic met regularly, starting with a workshop at the University of Warwick in 2002, then in panels organized at the conferences of the Society for the Sociology of Religion at the Social Science Research Centre in Berlin (in 2012), the European University Institute in Florence (2012), the University of Lausanne (in 2010 and 2014) and finally at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2014). On the initiative of a research team in the latter university (Investigacions en Sociologia de la Religió), a website has been created to publicize this work: http://religionpublicinstitutions.com. One of the first publications (Becci 2011) gathering together the work of these different scholars was an issue of the Archives de sciences sociales des religions. More recently, the contributions to the Florence RELIGIO workshop have been published by Stoeckl and Roy (2014) and a selection of the Lausanne papers presenting studies on religious diversity in hospitals has been edited by Pierre-Yves Brandt and is forthcoming with the publisher Labor et Fides (Geneva).
- 4.
I thank Jim Beckford for having pointed out this tension in a comment on this introduction, and for his other insightful comments.
- 5.
For instance, Höllinger and Tripold (2012).
- 6.
See for Great Britain www.religionandsociety.org.uk, for Switzerland www.pnr58.ch, for Sweden www.crs.uu.se and at a transnational European level www.religareproject.eu and www.eui.eu/Project/ReligioWest, last accessed on 6.1.2014
- 7.
For a sceptical critique, see Beckford (2012).
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Becci, I. (2015). European Research on Religious Diversity as a Factor in the Rehabilitation of Prisoners: An Introduction. In: Becci, I., Roy, O. (eds) Religious Diversity in European Prisons. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16778-7_1
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