ABSTRACT
The bricolage approach anchors religion in the individual and inscribes it in the continuum of theories of religious privatization. Numerous criminologists, mostly in the United States, where religious programmes in prison are very frequent, have studied the therapeutic effect of religious practice on inmates. According to Rachel Sarg and Anne-Sophie Lamine in Religion en prison', the ways in which prisoners relate, subjectively, to religion, faith and beliefs may be diverse. It is plausible to interpret, in the case of prison, chaplaincy as an order-giving institution that, jointly with timetables, bureaucracy and security measures, influences the possible extent of bricolage so that it is seen not only as an expression of an individual's personality but also as the result of the structural environment. Such structural frameworks bear the collective forces that have an effect on inmates and ex-inmates. Crisis and chaos are part of the prison culture and of the experience of release.
