2.« Religion, reintegration and rehabilitation in French prisons: The impact of prison secularism »

International audienceWhat place can religion take in French prisons ? What particular role can religion play in the perspective of the rehabilitation of prisoners in this country that defines itself as secular since the law of secularism of 1905 ? To answer these questions, the analysis presented in this chapter has the peculiarity to integrate the tools of the sociology of religion and those of the sociology of the prison. The objective is to understand how religion can be mobilized or not as an important factor of daily life, as an individual or collective resource, as a problem or solution in the prison world. Inspired by the theory of symbolic interactionism, the analysis focuses on the multiple actors that make up the prison world. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork through observations and interviews in eight French prisons, this text integrates the perspective of the prison administration, of the chaplains and of inmates. The French singularity expresses itself by the rather marginal place that religion occupies within prisons and by the weak resources that are assigned to the chaplains. In this paper the roles that the prison authorities attribute to the religion generally and to chaplains in particular are analysed. The administration uses the institutional religion as a way of policing and considers the spirituality as the source of appeasing. Chaplains face the context of secularization but their number are increasing in prisons because of the needs bound to religious diversity. In this context the different postures adopted by the chaplain sare explored, sometimes they are universalist and secular, sometimes confessional and moralizing. The place that spirituality can take in the life of the imprisoned persons is discussed, how it contributes to personal rehabilitation and to social reinsertion. By which processes can religion constitute a turning point in a biography and sometimes help the inmate to desist from crime? The inmates met and interested in religion have mobilized this resource in a prospect of structuration of time, to resist here and now, rather than in a long-term perspective oriented towards reintegration