Abstract

MANCHADO, Mauricio. “Salvation is personal”. Desistance, Religion and Narratives of Conversion in Prisons of Santa Fe (Argentina). URVIO [online]. 2021, n.29, pp.59-77. ISSN 1390-4299.  https://doi.org/10.17141/urvio.29.2021.4401.

This article aims to investigate the potentialities and difficulties of the theories of desistance from crime to analyze narratives of prison experiences of those who inhabit or inhabited the Evangelical Pentecostal Religious Device (DREP, by its acronym in Spanish) in prisons of the province of Santa Fe (Argentina). Throughout a qualitative methodology based on in-depth interviews and participant observations with prisoners living in the so-called “church-pavilions”, and people in charge of prison ministries outside the prison, we recognized the emergence of narratives based on multiple prosperities (sanitary, economic and penal) both inside and outside the prison. In these narratives, a proposal for personal transformation and identity changes emerges. That proposal is examined in the light of the theories of crime desistance, to analyze the subjective passages of the “offender” to the “desistent”. Therefore, the various approaches of these theories are questioned, by means of the dynamics and the effects that DREP assumes both in prisons and in post-confinement experiences. The investigation provides new explanatory elements to a phenomenon in full expansion throughout Latin America.

Keywords : desistance from crime; narratives; prison; religious conversion.

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