The Fight for Religious Freedom in America's Prisons

The Fight for Religious Freedom in America's Prisons PDF

Author: Hal Rollins

Publisher: Independently Published

Published: 2024-04-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Discover the fascinating narrative of faith, justice, and the battle for spiritual freedom behind bars in "The Fight for Religious Freedom in America's Prisons: A Riveting Journey Through the Legal and Spiritual Struggles of Inmates Fighting for Their Right to Worship in the Shadow of a Solar Eclipse." Explore the heartbreaking journey of six inmates who, united by their various beliefs, resist the repressive lockdown during a rare solar eclipse, attempting to restore their freedom to religious expression. This book provides a unique view into the legal fights, personal testimony, and deep relevance of faith in the darkest depths of the prison system. "The Fight for Religious Freedom in America's Prisons" is more than simply a legal struggle; it is a monument to the human spirit's endurance and unwavering pursuit of freedom. As you read each page, you'll be inspired by the convicts' bravery, affected by their faith, and motivated to consider the larger implications of justice and religious liberty in our society. Don't pass up the opportunity to go on this eye-opening journey. Purchase a copy of "The Fight for Religious Freedom in America's Prisons: A Riveting Journey Through the Legal and Spiritual Struggles of Inmates Fighting for Their Right to Worship in the Shadow of a Solar Eclipse" today and witness the transformative power of faith and the unwavering pursuit of justice.

Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison

Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison PDF

Author: United States Commission on Civil Rights

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From Executive summary: This report focuses on the government's efforts to enforce federal civil rights laws prohibiting religious discrimination in the administration and management of federal and state prisons. Prisoners in federal and state institutions retain certain religious exercise rights under the Constitution and statutes including the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUPIPA), the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and the Civil rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). Many states have similar provisions in their state constitutions and in state law modeled on RFRA. These rights must be balanced with the legitimate concerns of prisons officials, including cost, staffing, and most importantly, prison safety and security. Reconciling these rights and concerns can be a significant challenge for penal institutions, as well as courts.

Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison

Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison PDF

Author: United States Commission on Civil Rights

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From Executive summary: This report focuses on the government's efforts to enforce federal civil rights laws prohibiting religious discrimination in the administration and management of federal and state prisons. Prisoners in federal and state institutions retain certain religious exercise rights under the Constitution and statutes including the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUPIPA), the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and the Civil rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). Many states have similar provisions in their state constitutions and in state law modeled on RFRA. These rights must be balanced with the legitimate concerns of prisons officials, including cost, staffing, and most importantly, prison safety and security. Reconciling these rights and concerns can be a significant challenge for penal institutions, as well as courts.

Break Every Yoke

Break Every Yoke PDF

Author: Joshua Dubler

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-11-13

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0190949163

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced by Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream-and organize-this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition. Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, and economics that conventionally account for America's grotesque prison expansion of the last half century, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era's biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth century abolitionism, and by turning to today's grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition "spirit."

Endowed by Our Creator

Endowed by Our Creator PDF

Author: Michael I. Meyerson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-06-05

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 0300183496

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The debate over the framers' concept of freedom of religion has become heated and divisive. This scrupulously researched book sets aside the half-truths, omissions, and partisan arguments, and instead focuses on the actual writings and actions of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and others. Legal scholar Michael I. Meyerson investigates how the framers of the Constitution envisioned religious freedom and how they intended it to operate in the new republic. Endowed by Our Creator shows that the framers understood that the American government should not acknowledge religion in a way that favors any particular creed or denomination. Nevertheless, the framers believed that religion could instill virtue and help to unify a diverse nation. They created a spiritual public vocabulary, one that could communicate to all—including agnostics and atheists—that they were valued members of the political community. Through their writings and their decisions, the framers affirmed that respect for religious differences is a fundamental American value, Meyerson concludes. Now it is for us to determine whether religion will be used to alienate and divide or to inspire and unify our religiously diverse nation.

When Islam Is Not a Religion

When Islam Is Not a Religion PDF

Author: Asma T Uddin

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2019-07-09

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1643131745

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

American Muslim religious liberty lawyer Asma Uddin has long considered her work defending people of all faiths to be a calling more than a job. Yet even as she seeks equal protection for Evangelicals, Sikhs, Muslims, Native Americans, Jews, and Catholics alike, she has seen an ominous increase in attempts to criminalize Islam and exclude Muslim Americans from those protections.Somehow, the view that Muslims aren’t human enough for human rights or constitutional protections is moving from the fringe to the mainstream—along with the claim “Islam is not a religion.” This conceit is not just a threat to the First Amendment rights of American Muslims. It is a threat to the freedom of all Americans.Her new book reveals a significant but overlooked danger to our religious liberty. Woven throughout this national saga is Uddin’s own story and the stories of American Muslims and other people of faith who have faced tremendous indignities as they attempt to live and worship freely.Combining her experience of Islam as a religious truth and her legal and philosophical appreciation that all individuals have a right to religious liberty, Uddin examines the shifting tides of American culture and outlines a way forward for individuals and communities navigating today’s culture wars.

Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison

Enforcing Religious Freedom in Prison PDF

Author: United States Commission on Civil Rights

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781607418092

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Prisoners in federal and state institutions retain certain religious exercise rights under the Constitution and statutes including the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). Many states have similar provisions in their state constitutions and in state law modelled on RFRA. These rights must be balanced with the legitimate concerns of prison officials, including cost, staffing, and, most importantly, prison safety and security. Reconciling these rights and concerns can be a significant challenge for penal institutions, as well as the courts. The United States Commission on Civil Rights examined the legal foundation of prisoners' religious exercise rights, and the rules and guidelines related to religion in federal and state prisons and jails. It also researched the mechanisms federal and state prisons and jails use to facilitate religious requests (where feasible), and to record and process prisoner grievances related to religious exercise. This book focuses on the government's efforts to enforce federal civil rights laws prohibiting religious discrimination in the administration and management of federal and state prisons. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

Down in the Chapel

Down in the Chapel PDF

Author: Joshua Dubler

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2013-08-13

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 146683711X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A bold and provocative interpretation of one of the most religiously vibrant places in America—a state penitentiary Baraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid—four black men from South Philadelphia, two Christian and two Muslim—are serving life sentences at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in Graterford's chapel, a place that is at once a sanctuary for religious contemplation and an arena for disputing the workings of God and man. Day in, day out, everything is, in its twisted way, rather ordinary. And then one of them disappears. Down in the Chapel tells the story of one week at Graterford Prison. We learn how the men at Graterford pass their time, care for themselves, and commune with their makers. We observe a variety of Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and others, at prayer and in study and song. And we listen in as an interloping scholar of religion tries to make sense of it all. When prisoners turn to God, they are often scorned as con artists who fake their piety, or pitied as wretches who cling to faith because faith is all they have left. Joshua Dubler goes beyond these stereotypes to show the religious life of a prison in all its complexity. One part prison procedural, one part philosophical investigation, Down in the Chapel explores the many uses prisoners make of their religions and weighs the circumstances that make these uses possible. Gritty and visceral, meditative and searching, it is an essential study of American religion in the age of mass incarceration.

Joseph Smith for President

Joseph Smith for President PDF

Author: Spencer W. McBride

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190909412

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"In 1844, Joseph Smith, the controversial founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had amassed a national following of some 25,000 believers-and a militia of some 2,500 men. In this year, his priority was protecting the lives and civil rights of his people. Having failed to win the support of any of the presidential contenders for these efforts, Smith launched his own renegade campaign for the White House, one that would end with his assassination at the hands of an angry mob. Smith ran on a platform that called for the total abolition of slavery, the closure of the country's penitentiaries, the reestablishment of a national bank to stabilize the economy, and most importantly an expansion of protections for religious minorities. Spencer W. McBride tells the story of Smith's quixotic but consequential run for the White House and shows how his calls for religious freedom helped to shape the American political system we know today"--