Prison chaplains and moral counsellors: their perceptions of prisoners

The prison system was originally part of a religious vision of punishment, or penitence, from which the term penitentiary derives (Jarrett et al., 2024). As today's society moves towards the secularisation of powers and institutions, the religious interventions of prison chaplaincies are now being revisited. In Belgium, secularism refers to the neutrality of the State, which recognises religious denominations and philosophies based on equality in the subsidies granted (Delgrange, 2016). The Belgian state therefore funds ministers of religion and religion teachers, as well as religious and secular workers in prisons, this last point being the focus of the presentation. Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights enshrines everyone's right to freedom of belief and expression of those beliefs. The Belgian Constitution then specifies this right for inmates, recognising their right to practice and receive religious or philosophical support of their choice under the Fundamental Law of 12 January 2005. As a result, the Belgian government remunerates workers from different religious or secular affiliations, while also allowing volunteers to provide such support.

To this day, religious and secular interventions remain understudied in the literature (Castel, 2021). In this presentation, we will focus on how prison chaplains and moral counsellors (translated from the Belgian term ‘conseiller moral’) see inmates: how they perceive them and how are they perceived?

Ten participants were interviewed during a single semi-structured interview. Recruitment led to a population made up of Catholic, Protestant, Muslim representatives and moral counsellors, working in various French-speaking Belgian prisons. The verbatims were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2021), which allowed for the identification of the diversity of approaches in the interventions according to the needs of the inmates, as well as the values and principles that underpin their perception of the inmates, aligning with a profoundly humanist vision.