ABSTRACT
Who is more equipped to challenge, affirm, or relate to a prisoner than another prisoner? In this chapter we explore the possibility that prisoners may well be the most appropriate people to aid other inmates in the process of being reformed. We focus specifically on religious groups indigenous to the cellblocks and how these offender-led religious movements have the capacity to provide participants a strong identity, an alternative moral framework, and a set of embodied practices that emphasize virtue and character development. The fact that volunteers and prisoners themselves can help reform our prisons may simply be too difficult for many correctional leaders and policy-makers to accept. However, if we are going to make the necessary steps to reform our current system of incarceration, we are going to need to be open to this possibility.
