Faith provision, institutional power and meaning among Muslim prisoners in two English high security prisons

As the numbers of prisoners identifying with Islam in English prisons have doubled in the past decade, so too have concerns around order, control and extremism within this population. This chapter details these new developments, and describes the entanglements between faith recognition and provision, identity and meaning, and institutional power in English high security prisons. We draw on our findings from an ESRC-funded study of two English high security prisons involving 10 months of fieldwork and long interviews with staff and prisoners. We argue that the way institutional power is exercised comes to bear in subtle but significant ways upon the subjective experience of faith identity among prisoners and contributes to a range of expressions of religious identity from resistance and protest to personal development and exploration. This article makes the more general case that the interests occupying criminologists and penologists around order and control, and the interests among religious studies, scholars in chaplaincy studies, and the sociology of religion around faith provision and meaning can no longer operate in distinct silos in view of the current dynamics around faith identity and power