Conversion and Coercion in American Prisons

Extract

PMLA invites members of the association to submit letters, printed and double-spaced, that comment on articles in previous issues or on matters of general scholarly or critical interest. The editor reserves the right to reject or edit Forum contributions and offers the PMLA authors discussed in published letters an opportunity to reply. Submissions of more than one thousand words are not considered. The journal omits titles before persons' names and discourages endnotes and works-cited lists in the Forum. Letters should be addressed to PMLA Forum, Modern Language Association, 26 Broadway, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10004-1789.

What obligations does literary scholarship have to its society, culture, and laws? The question arises in Tanya Erzen's “Religious Literacy in the Faith-Based Prison” (123.3 [2008]: 659–64). The problems with this account of Florida's Lawtey Correctional Institution and its religious-right rehabilitation program begin with the essay's title. One would take “religious literacy” to mean something like “competence in religious history and/or religious doctrine,” but in this essay it does not: for here “religious literacy” is a euphemism for total immersion in and complete acceptance of the Southern Baptist belief system. The author calls such brainwashing “religious self-knowledge” (660), though it seems aimed at the obliteration of any vestiges of selfhood. Even the phrase “faith-based prison” is a smokescreen: “faith,” a term that in our highly religious and religiously diverse culture has generally positive associations, here conceals the ugly truth that the only faith that counts at Lawtey is fundamentalist Christianity.