Religion and Prison
Prisoners are given religious freedom and privileges while in prison. This includes access to a chaplain or religious advisor, authorized religious reading materials, ability to change faith, as well as other privileges. Several faith-based outreach programs that provide faith promoting guidance and counselling.
Every three months, the Ministry of Justice collects data, including religious affiliation, of UK prisoners and is published as the Offender Management Caseload Statistics. This data is then compiled in to reports and published in the House of Commons library. A comparison with the major surveys of UK adult individuals, the British Social Attitudes and the European Social Surveys. Religious representation is greater for prisoners serving a sentence of at least four years than for those of shorter terms.
Methodology for obtaining data is substantially different between the British Social Attitudes Survey and the Ministry of Justice reports. Prisoners provide the Ministry of Justice their religious preference/beliefs in order to receive respective religious privileges.
Read more about this topic: Religion In The United Kingdom, Religion and Society
Famous quotes containing the words religion and, religion and/or prison:
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
—C.S. (Clive Staples)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“So must pure lovers’ souls descend
T’affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)