In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid account of religious life within an institution designed to punish. Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women’s prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis shows how women draw on religion to navigate lived experiences of carceral control. A trenchant study of religion colliding and colluding with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and constraint, this book speaks to the quest for dignity and light against the backdrop of mass incarceration, state surveillance, and American inequality.

"This book is highly valuable as an experience that helps readers build a mental schema of some of the women inmates’ realities of incarceration." - Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work

" "Ellis’ piercing study, beautifully written, vividly demonstrates the double-edged sword of religion in prison – its capacity to liberate and its equal power to subjugate."
 " - Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

"Ellis’ contributions are significant to a plethora of academic fields, while her writing style is easily digestible as she recalls the lived experiences of the women at Mapleside Prison." - Gender and Society

"Ellis develops three-dimensional, nuanced portrayals of the interiority of women’s lives, recognizing women’s full and complex humanity in ways neither the carceral nor religious discourses that are the object of her study do. Ellis is an exceptionally skilled, ethical, and transparent ethnographer. Her methodological appendix should be required reading in sociological research methods classes." - Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion

"Accessible and well-written, In This Place Called Prison will engage not only students of sociology and carceral studies, but scholars of lived religion, gender and sexuality, and political theology, as well." - Political Theology Journal

"This is an excellent book that is easily accessible, thought provoking, and sheds light on an important, but under studied, topic." - Review of Religious Research

"Ellis switches brilliantly between major structural analysis that contextualizes and personal stories that tell the cases of particular women. She is indeed interested most of all in the personal transformation that incarcerated women undergo and in the role that religion can play here." - Journal of Contemporary Religion

"By showing how religion in prison is both a resource and a power, as well as a source of power and control, Ellis makes an original and relevant contribution to debates in the sociology of religion and prison sociology." - Sociology of Religion

" "This book is a welcome addition to the interdisciplinary study of the law, and it would make a powerful contribution to conversations in sociology, philosophy, ethics, political science, religion, and gender studies classrooms—as well as to scholarly research agendas."" - Law, Culture and the Humanities

"Ellis is a skilled and empathetic ethnographer. . .The women about whom she writes are complex people navigating a world of very limited choices."
  - Law & Society Review