Religion, Emotion, Sensation

Affect Theories and Theologies

Karen Bray, Stephen D. Moore, Karen Bray, Stephen D. Moore

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780823285662, 9780823285679
• eBook ISBN: 9780823285686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, and liturgies. Contributors explore the crossings and crisscrossings between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly, as well as the political and social import of such work.Bringing together affect theorists, theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars of religion, this volume enacts creative transdisciplinary interventions in the study of affect and religion through exploring such topics as biblical literature, Christology, animism, Rastafarianism, the women's Mosque Movement, the unending Korean War, the Sewol ferry disaster, trans and gender queer identities, YA fiction, queer historiography, the prison industrial complex, debt and neoliberalism, and death and poetry.Contributors: Mathew Arthur, Amy Hollywood, Wonhee Anne Joh, Dong Sung Kim, A. Paige Rawson, Erin Runions, Donovan O. Schaefer, Gregory J. Seigworth, Max Thornton, Alexis G. Waller

Immobile Theologies, Carceral Affects: Interest and Debt in Faith-Based Prison Programs

ERIN RUNIONS

This essay considers the affective movements of interest and debt as they circulate into the prison-industrial complex through biblical teaching aimed at personal salvation and moral amelioration.¹ My understanding of affect is expansive; it extends to emotion, emotive potential, and that which produces motion, mobility, and importantly for the argument here, immobility—in and beyond the body. I am interested in affect as cognitive and unconscious responses to signification, as well as the affective impact of ideological apparatuses, material/economic structures, and technology.² Drawing on theoretical discussions of affect in relation to interest, debt, animacy, and the posthuman, I consider the movements, countermovements, flows, blockages, pools, secretions, and toxicities within a racialized hierarchy of interest and debt, traveling beyond particular subjects and through the many cells and components of the prison-industrial complex. I argue that faith-based prison programs produce a demand for the pursuit of self-interest, countered by the imposition of spiritual and actual debt, thus immobilizing the incarcerated as interested-yet-always-indebted.

Since 2001 there has been an increase in Christian faith-based programming in prisons. Under the direction of Jeb Bush in Florida and George W. Bush in Washington, prisons in many U.S. states have allowed largely privately funded Christian groups to run faith-based programs inside prisons. Michael Hallett and Byron Johnson have called the increase in faith-based programming a shift to a New American Penitentiary.³ Florida, for instance, boasts of three full faith-based prisons, with twelve more faith-based dorms.⁴ These programs take a variety of forms, ranging from weekly Bible study to separate housing units—sometimes called “god pods”—with better food and more freedom. Typically they provide a full schedule of activities, including substantial amounts of Bible study and spiritual accountability. One of the best-known of these programs is Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, centrally featured in this essay. Among other ministries, Prison Fellowship runs InnerChange Freedom Initiative with residential programs in Minnesota and Texas.⁵ Others faith-based housing units include God of Hope Ministries with dorms in Texas,⁶ and Horizon Communities with dorms in several states, including Florida, Ohio, and Oklahoma. The Ohio Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation states its reliance on volunteer faith-based programs to run faith-based housing units and also reintegration units, including “Prison Fellowship, Horizon Prison Ministry, Gospel Express, Kairos Prison Ministry, Bill Glass Champions for Life, Promise Keepers, Urban Bible Institute, Wings Ministry, Aleph Institute, Islamic Council, Crossroads Prison Ministry and other local faith-based volunteers.”⁷ The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), now Core-Civic, one of the largest private prison corporations, partners with a number of ministries for both residential and reentry services, including Champions for Life, Prison Fellowship, Purpose Driven Life Ministry, Alpha USA, School of Christ International, and Trinity Broadcasting Network.⁸

Christian groups take seriously Jesus’ gospel exhortation to visit those in prisons as if they were Christ himself (Mt 25:36). In her ethnography, God in Captivity, Tanya Erzen documents how Christian ministries provide resources, solace, and meaning for incarcerated people, even as they mask other problems.⁹ I do not want to dismiss the genuine concern and care of Christians ministering in prisons and the significant hope and dignity that these programs can bring to those held inside prisons. Yet I would like to examine critically, as Mark Lewis Taylor urges, dominant notions of Christianity that can implicitly and explicitly feed the prison-industrial complex. The Christian abstraction of salvation from torture and death, Taylor argues, “sets the stage for a denigration of matter and bodies, which in turn often yields a toleration of degrading punishments meted out upon bodies—especially racially marked bodies in a white dominant society.”¹⁰ Following this critique, I explore how Christian teaching in prisons affectively connects with larger structures of economy and race to inculcate notions of literal and abstract interest and debt in ways that can be damaging to those whom Christian programs presume to serve.

Interest and debt stand in immobilizing tension for the incarcerated. Interest operates on two fronts: as actual financial return on the investments that prisons have become, and as self-interest in personal motivation. These two meanings of interest may seem unrelated, yet they are, as we will see, historically, ideologically, economically, and affectively intertwined; further, they are connected to literal and affective debt to the state, to society, and, in Christian terms, to God.¹¹ Those who are able to opt into faith-based programs are encouraged to follow their interests to become “productive” members of society on reentry after serving their time. Yet the incarcerated person is still one whose indebtedness and lack can only be ameliorated by salvation in Christ and personal reform. The religious language of sin and salvation in these programs is based on an economic model of debt and payment that contributes to racialized structures of oppression in the United States. The push and pull between interest and debt produces a confounded subjectivity, to borrow a line from Saidiya Hartman’s analysis of racial discrimination after emancipation.¹² It affectively impacts mobility, and importantly for the argument here, immobility—in and beyond the body. The demand for forward movement and productivity in these programs is thwarted by immobility and criminalization.

The stakes go beyond actual prisons, however; interest and debt are part of a literal and rhetorical economy that circulates through a range of carceral technologies beyond prison walls, with consequences for the nonincarcerated and the environment. As part of a financialized and data-driven security economy, the prison-industrial complex enfolds, shapes, and goes beyond the human as a technology that impacts particularly, but not only, the incarcerated. Multiple systems of financialized economy, corporate power, and securitized governance use logics of surveillance, security, environmental deregulation, and extraction of human “resources” in such a way that they also could be considered carceral technologies. Those, like myself, who want to work against the injustice of prisons need to consider this wider set of carceral economic affects and dynamics so that indebtedness, environmental toxicity, and immobility do not become the new norms of punishment.

ECONOMIC INTEREST, THE PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, AND FAITH-BASED PROGRAMS

The entrenchment of the prison-industrial complex is in large part due to a financialized economy.¹³ As Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued with respect to California, the prison industry was able to solve several problems that emerged within the economic shift to financialization in the United States: Prisons absorbed surplus capital, surplus land, surplus population, and surplus state capacity.¹⁴ Importantly for the emerging financialization, prisons provided financiers ways to lend to governmental borrowers—and earn interest—without feeding into right-wing complaints about public debt and social spending.¹⁵ Politicians generated panic around crime in order to justify these new financial practices. As Gilmore details, beginning in the early 1980s, financiers helped the Californian politicians figure out how to issue bonds to investors—that is, to go into debt—for prison projects without having to ask voters.¹⁶ They did so through what Kevin Pranis and Christopher Petrella have called the “backdoor method” of selling lease revenue bonds, which do not require a vote.¹⁷ In a practice that continues to the present day, the California Public Works Board issues lease revenues bonds to finance prisons. Once built, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation “leases” the prisons from Public Works, thereby paying the interest on the bonds for investors from tax dollars. The amount of money used in this endeavor is enormous; to give an example, in 2007, the California State Assembly passed AB 900 which allocated $7.3 billion as lease revenue bonds for prisons, jails, and reentry programs.¹⁸

Who earns interest on prisons, then? Investors who buy government issued bonds, or investors in private prisons. Those who profit range from retirees to investment bankers. Government bonds are considered secure investments, because of the political risks of decarcerating. For instance, a 2008 advice article in Forbes, written in at the height of the U.S. financial crisis, explains lease revenue bonds for prisons as a secure investment:

The state creates an entity or agency to build the prison. The agency floats bonds to the public [investors] to cover construction of the facility. The agency then leases the right to use the completed prison to the state. The state pays the entity lease payments. The entity uses the lease payments to service the bond debt. Essentially, the state takes money from one pocket (the general fund appropriations to the prison system) and puts it into another pocket (the agency created for the facility), and then the agency distributes the money to the bondholders. . . . Any state that would stop making lease payments on its correctional facility bonds and set incarcerated offenders out on the streets would have some explaining to do. The stakes are too high for society to permit such default. We think the risk is minimal for prison bonds.¹⁹

Prisons are secure investments precisely because of the politically generated panic around crime. Underwriters make money too, including Morgan Stanley, J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch, who b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Mappings and Crossings
• The Animality of Affect: Religion, Emotion, and Power
• Capitalism as Religion, Debt as Interface: Wearing the World as a Debt Garment
• Immobile Theologies, Carceral Affects: Interest and Debt in Faith-Based Prison Programs
• Affective Politics of the Unending Korean War: Remembering and Resistance
• Weeping by the Water: Hydraulic Affects and Political Depression in South Korea after Sewol
• Reading (with) Rhythm for the Sake of the (I-n-)Islands: A Rastafarian Interpretation of Samson as Ambi(val)ent Affective Assemblage
• The “Unspeakable Teachings” of The Secret Gospel of Mark: Feelings and Fantasies in the Making of Christian Histories
• Gender: A Public Feeling?
• Writing Affect and Theology in Indigenous Futures
• Feeling Dead, Dead Feeling
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series List