While I lived in post-apartheid South Africa and was stringing for an investigative magazine based there, I rather hopelessly interviewed the head of a large worship and visitation organization serving prisons around Cape Town.

Years before, this woman had spent three days in jail in tandem with her husband, though she was never charged or even formally suspected in a robbery he had committed.

Her main concern at the time, she told me, hadn't been the injustice done to her or the possibility of getting her husband off (he was eventually convicted and served several years), but the lack of religious wellsprings for those confined. As soon as she got out, she began arranging a broad network of ministry—which couldn't have been an easy job for a working-class "Cape Coloured" (mixed-race) woman. She had the forthright but—in South Africa's political environment—rather wacky goal of moral reform for social reintegration. No matter how depraved or dangerous, prisoners would get out, and quite early compared to those in the U.S. If they were to be creatures of the Lord and no longer of the gangs, she deemed, they particularly needed preparation for jobs that could anchor them.

This last must have seemed to those around her the looniest fantasy of all, as unemployment for the "previously disadvantaged" who have never been in trouble is—pick a number above the government's fudged statistics, but it's certainly more than 30 percent. But at the time I interviewed my informant and accompanied her to a couple of prison services, she reported herself prayerfully satisfied with progress. With volunteers' help, her converts found remunerative things to do on release and stayed out of trouble; or at least the men did. "When you tell them what to do, they do it," she said, "but the women … " She rolled her eyes.

I could see what she meant about the men, at any rate, when I met one of her protégés, a reformed manslaughterer who had endured a prison stabbing without retaliation; fled his old neighborhood after his release, under the threat that his old gang would rape his 14-year-old daughter if he didn't come back to work for them; then suffered a gang robbery and second stabbing in his new neighborhood, afterwards giving up his own gun to avoid temptation. This man was eminently employable, and in fact became a local builder's trusty. I and another unarmed white Quaker could confidently visit him and let him know all about us (he was a regular in the other's home), and we found we could rely on every word he said—an astonishing cross-ethnic bond for the time and place.

As for the worship, I was guardedly impressed. Hundreds of men attended in the Pollsmoor Prison exercise yard, some of them staring sullenly, some singing and dancing with abandon, a couple wandering away, one trying to send a message out with me but quickly stopped. At a minimum, a piece of the outside world to which they owed nothing, and which owed nothing to them, had come in and was relieving their boredom and the terror of the cells.

The hopelessness I mentioned at the beginning came from the certainty that I wasn't going to be able to place copy along these lines with my magazine or any other influential one in South Africa—this in spite of my rejecting some metaphysical claims common to evangelicals.

Religion was colonialist, hidebound, necessarily a power-play, a distraction, or a delusion—so held every leading editor in the country. If facts suggested otherwise, here was a theory, a piece of received wisdom, a slogan, a quotation, or some other badge of élite savvy to cut off discomfiting lines of inquiry. It was much the same when I returned to the U.S. and acquired lofty publishing contacts here. "Emerson wrote that prayer is a weakness of the will, and belief a weakness of the intellect," Harold Bloom snapped at me at Yale, and I thought, "My professional circle is a very comfortable but windowless room."

This is all by way of admitting that I was prepared to be irritated by Joshua Dubler's Down in the Chapel, his story of a week in Pennsylvania's Graterford Prison chapel, where he was doing a long-term research stint as part of a graduate program at Princeton. But I did not expect such a tangle, such knotted accounts of conditions that accord with common knowledge or easy conjecture in an increasingly crowded, troubled, and divided world, with its prisons forming a natural degraded and degrading counterpart. Manipulative prisoners may use the chapel to get ahead or to run scams. And within the intricate, often arbitrary "carceral control" that is now the norm in the U.S., prisoners (especially lifers) readily turn to the practical fulfillments and adjustments with which chapels can still help: relatively safe social activities, interesting study, training in self-mastery, and sometimes even professional development.

Whether any of this, on balance, defies or serves the "prison industrial complex," and whether or not it promotes individuals' or society's true interests, are questions that I, for one, cherish. But these are questions Dubler, in an almost teasing manner, dithers over but avoids pursuing. In fact, he records himself saying, to the obvious confusion of visiting nuns, that he wants "to interrupt the reader's desire to know what 'religion in prison,' as such, is all about."

He seems immensely hampered by his methods and attitudes. Granted, an "ethnographic study" of prisoners (the first of those words is justified by the fact that his four main subjects are African Americans, and that the same Philadelphia neighborhood funnels a surprising number of its young males to Graterford) can't deliver any ultimate truth and shouldn't aim to. But persuasive findings of social science already exist in plenty, and there is plenty of room for more. Dubler's extensive endnotes do feature Human Rights Watch advocacy, newspaper reporting, and specialist research on—I look at random and see a book on Muslim clergy in America and one on the human nervous system. Yet he is strikingly averse to statistics, or in fact to any kind of forward-pushing evidence or reasoning, despite the heaps of fuel at hand—or maybe because of them.

The value of the sections in which Dubler plainly does concentrate makes me wistful that he doesn't concentrate much more overall. He includes a number of historical digressions that are quite interesting. Especially in connection with an epoch-making raid on contraband purportedly linked to chapel activities, he gives the reader pieces of the obscure, sad story of the alienation arms race in our country's prisons during recent decades. More and more isolated, bullied, purposeless, and hopeless—that is, more and more effectively punished—prisoners have had less and less to lose; marvelously, they then behave worse, bringing on new hardships that drive them to new depths of violence and manipulation. At some stage, reintegration into society, which requires trust on both sides, turns from a dream into a fantasy. Dubler could have usefully written a book about this process.

But on the whole, even more than certain prisoners whose intellectualizing he describes, he lacks urgency or hierarchy in his inquiries; and while the prisoners have the excuse of the larger society's indifference to what they know or how they use it, he of course does not. His more-objective sources get just glancing blows in his text, and he is caught up instead with the philosophy of religion and other thinking that bears on it—the more abstract, the better, without much critical distinction between the quality of, say, Alexis de Tocqueville and William James on the one hand, and Marx and queer theory on the other. Pop culture artifacts come in for equally unedifying treatment—certainly not the kind of slow and penetrating analysis that, in George Orwell, makes them testify concerning social relations. Dubler does not make anything in particular a sustained premise for his own inquiries, following up on claims. His conclusions are ten "Theses," of a blandness on the level with "Religion at Graterford is decidedly of its time" (the beginning of Thesis 10).

Dubler's interactions with the prisoners appear even more dubious. The mistakes of Margaret Mead should—and mostly do—stand as a warning to anthropologists about their ability to distort data through their mere assertive, self-regarding presence. Even so, the gold standard of humane but objective research into an alien underclass remains David Simon and Edward Burns's The Corner (1997), which is not academic research but simple journalism. It succeeded through observation (of Baltimore drug addicts, dealers, and their circles) so restrained that the subjects came to feel and behave as if they were alone.

Standardized interviews, careful participation that yields data mere observation couldn't, and other methods also work, but I can't imagine that hanging out with subjects hour after hour, inviting scary roughhousing and competing in yelling matches, taking part in their filching out of mutual "boredom," but most of the time engaging in the sort of debates typical in an undergraduate dormitory, would achieve anything but an epistemological feedback loop. And the researcher's ethical position might well be undermined to the degree that the question of his findings' validity is secondary. Rather, his reader could ask, did he hurt people? Did he, at the least, try their tempers and tempt them to manipulate him, against their efforts to build some self-esteem and peace of mind?

His subjects offer, and Dubler passes on, evidence that they suspected and disliked him. With his privileged background and connections (signaled within the prison itself by the liberal access given him to the chapel and later to the cell blocks), he had nothing important at stake in his interactions, not even the success of his project; with such apparently loose criteria, how could it fail?

It is quite something for a writer to incur the just contempt of a prison chapel janitor from among the inmate population, yet to be so insensible of its force that he simply offers the exchange to readers, as if he had not evaluated it commonsensically, or thought they wouldn't, or felt that such an evaluation didn't matter:

"So what?" Vic asks me rhetorically [sic], and not for the first time. "The microscopic world of germs didn't exist before the advent of the microscope?"
Toeing the pragmatist philosophical line of the Princeton Religion Department, I maintain my skepticism about making any definitive judgments, necessarily in language, about a realm putatively [sic] prior to language.

Later, Dubler on his own all but endorses the prisoners' disdain, while noting—perhaps with some smugness—a large area of practical immunity from it:

[Sayyid, another prisoner, and a chapel star] has the papers he promised me last week that he wrote for Sister Barkley, the lively but astringent octogenarian Villanova professor who proudly goes by "Attila the Nun," and who—in the manner that made me appreciate the luxury of doing fieldwork in a population barred from calling or writing to me—has repeatedly excoriated me for the amorphousness of my scholarly methodology.

Dubler's unaccountability may have sometimes lent itself to meddling cruel in effect if not intention. With (apparently) no counseling training or strict professional standards like those of the chaplains, and nothing like their need to maintain long-term relationships with the prison administration and the prisoners, there was nothing to keep him from, for example, playing the amateur psychologist and insistently prodding a prisoner's fantasy of invulnerability recounted in the third person, which Dubler thought was covering up a history of childhood abuse. Even more discreditably, he roped another prisoner into making the final, semi-accusatory, dignity-stripping confrontation.

A chaplain is shown confirming the terrible mistake (the book sports another term) as entirely Dubler's. But the author is "thoroughly unnerved" about the allegedly acting-out prisoner, now shattered and withdrawn, only as the "decoder" he himself depends on; and the prisioner's "bizarre behavior seemed to call his sanity into question," as if wholly independently of his treatment today. For Dubler, months, years of mouthing about power relations have not produced an inkling about a powerful person's real range of options and responsibilities. He does not apologize, but instead "redirect[s] the afternoon's exchange," letting his subject slip "easily back into mastery [sic!]" and shunning (as habitually) any admission of his critical personal vulnerability—in that he does not sufficiently know or care what he is doing—that could bring him insight as well as the ability to act more credibly.

His academic wanderings, his veering, his circling back toward some rather obvious political and sociological points, are not at all a good substitute for a serious, "What about me?" especially as regards the book's central (though poorly sustained) drama. Sayyid disappears, somehow implicated or merely suspected in wrongdoing, and Dubler's sense of what is going on is second-hand, his inquiries, though earnest, conspicuously sporadic. The chaplains and others are distressed but necessarily cagey. It should prove a good chance for a meditation on some basic meanings of power and powerlessness. It doesn't.

The book ends with a piece of really cold-hearted relativism, as Dubler "intemperately … ramble[s]" to a troubled prisoner, including notifying him that " 'everybody's got to figure out his own way. And that's true in here no less than out on the street.' " Thanks, pal, you're right: what could the difference be?

They embrace, but it's a careless embrace on Dubler's part. " 'Sorry if I just stabbed you in the back with my pen,' I say, without immediate recognition of the full significance of my words." That's clever, for the moment, anyway—which is the whole point, isn't it?

Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar in classics at Brown University. She recently finished translating the Oresteia of Aeschylus for the Modern Library series with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible is forthcoming from Knopf early in 2015.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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