Consideration of the relationship between religion and the criminal justice system (CJS) in England and Wales cannot be undertaken without, at the same time, examining the role of chaplaincy services. Oversight of religious provision within prisons and secure hospitals has been one of the main functions of chaplains within such institutions from their inception. As this book’s subject matter straddles the domains of both prison- and (secure) hospital-based chaplaincy practices, it is appropriate to include healthcare chaplains when constructing an historical overview (see also Chapter 8). Whilst prison chaplains are funded by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), those serving in secure hospitals are paid out of National Health Service (NHS) budgets and the two operate under separate systems of training, policy and accountability. The different balances of institutional emphases between the punitive and the therapeutic require that the two roles are not overly conflated in any consideration of chaplaincy provision in prisons and secure hospitals. Healthcare and prison chaplains also have a different social history. These reasons explain why literature from chaplaincy studies takes a differentiated approach that highlights both the ministerial continuities and the contextually shaped differences across the variety of institutions within which chaplains can be found (Legood, 1999; Swift, Cobb, & Todd, 2016; Threlfall-Holmes & Newitt, 2011).

I write from the experience of having served as a chaplain in a large training prison in the East Midlands. This was also the site of my fieldwork for research following the academic discipline of practical theology (PT). PT is a problematising, interdisciplinary, context-based and practice-focussed form of enquiry. In my research, I have employed an action-learning approach and this socio-historical overview of the role of religion in the CJS will likewise draw upon some of my experiential learning as well as desk-based research. This approach will serve the book’s purpose of being relevant not only to academics but also to practitioners and the general public.

I begin with an incident from the context of healthcare chaplaincy that illustrates a precariousness concerning religious provision in secular institutions and systems in twenty-first-century Britain. In August 2006, the Trust Board of the Worcester Acute Hospitals NHS Trust decided to scrap its chaplaincy department due to budget cuts (Swift, 2014, p. 85ff.). This precipitated a national debate. A long-running tension surfaced in the public discourse concerning the spending of taxpayers’ money on religious matters in secular institutions run by the state. This tension continues and affects both secure hospitals and prisons. During the “age of austerity” (post-2008), it is unsurprising that voices from some quarters have become more strident in questioning the secular state’s funding of religious matters from the public purse (Hamburgh, 2017).

The September 2018 results of a British Social Attitudes survey found that 52% of the almost 3000 participants identified as having “No Religion”, a figure that has been rising for a number of years (NatCen, 2018). Some thereby argue that this statistically further supports the view that the United Kingdom (UK) is largely a secular nation and religion should not have a publicly funded role in its institutions. But the picture is more complicated than this, as is revealed when we consider the demographics of the prison population where only 31% self-declare as having no religion whilst 48% identify as belonging to a Christian denomination and 15% as being Muslim (Sturge, 2018). The apparent discrepancy between the general and the prison population regarding religious affiliation highlights the contextual peculiarities of religion, faith and spirituality behind bars, which I shall return to and explore later in this chapter.

In 2015, there were approximately 900 full-time and part-time chaplaincy posts in the NHS (Hamburgh, 2017). Some healthcare chaplains serve in the three high security hospitals (Ashworth, Rampton and Broadmoor) or in the approximately 60 medium secure units and 150 low security units across the country. Figures for number of chaplains appointed to these services were unavailable but in 2013 there were approximately 6000 mental health patients held in high (680), medium (2800) or low (2500) security establishments (Joint Commissioning Panel for Mental Health, 2013). This compares with 123 full-time and 238 part-time chaplains employed by HMPPS as of March 2017 (Ministry of Justice, 2017). The prison population in May 2018 was 83,430 held in 121 prisons across England and Wales.

This socio-historical study of the evolution of chaplains will argue that these religious functionaries are not merely an accident of history but very much woven into the institutional weft and weave of prisons and hospitals. This is not to attempt to formulate an argument from history to justify the ongoing public funding of chaplaincy services. That is for others to argue for or against elsewhere. The argument here is that the religious and state-endorsed role of a chaplain in prisons and secure hospitals cannot be understood without first exploring the historical contexts that created and shaped these religious functionaries.

The prison chaplains are entirely useless. They are, as a class, well-meaning, but foolish, indeed silly, men. (Oscar Wilde cited in Wilde, Jackson, & Small, 2000)

For most of the history of the office of “Chaplain”, the term referred to a Christian minister (usually ordained) who provided pastoral care as well as religious education and services (e.g. leading acts of worship and hearing confessions) in an institutional setting (which also included places of education such as schools and universities) where he (as was invariably the case) would have the use of a chapel (a place of worship outside of the parish geographical system).

The etymology of the word “chaplain” is disputed (Beckford & Gilliat-Ray, 1998, p. 26f.). The most popular¹ associates the title with the legend of Saint Martin of Tours who lived in the fourth century CE.² Hagiography describes him as a Roman soldier who took pity on a naked beggar, tore his military cloak in two and shared the garment with him as an act of charity. Martin later became Bishop of Tours in France and, after his death, a relic alleged to be his half of the cloak was revered and carried into battle by Merovingian kings in the religious belief God would bless their military endeavours with success. The Latin for “little cloak” was cappella, and this word became associated with the small temporary shrines erected to hold the relic and the ministers who served at the reliquary became known as cappellani or, in French, chapelains. Over time, it is argued, the association between the relic and the reliquary was lost and all small extra-parochial ecclesiastical buildings became referred to as chapels and those who served in them as chaplains.

This hagiographical background may seem far removed from our concerns with the CJS and its relationship with religion. However, it is an important reminder that, from the outset, the very notion of “chaplain” may have connoted a religious function serving institutional purposes that some people of that same faith group might question. In my own research, I have explored how chaplains might contribute to the “humanising of incarceration” but some interlocutors have queried whether that is even possible as modern mass incarceration could be judged essentially inhumane (Beedon, 2017). This is a tension that chaplains operate within. Whilst those with a secularist agenda question the public funding of religious provision in state institutions, some religious people are equally uncomfortable with the possible compromising of the critical function of “speaking truth to power” that chaplains can suffer (Forrester, 2000, p. 86; Phillips, 2013, p. 34). This raises a (small “p”) political issue with respect to a chaplain’s constant negotiation of a role where they are co-loc...