The third meeting dove into how the law broadly regulates religious expression inside prisons and jails, and how chaplains can fit into the religious-legal ecosystem—if they should concern themselves with the law at all. Additionally, group members representing religious re-entry organizations described how their religious identity informed their community work and how the law supported or hindered those efforts.

1. Our discussion began with religious sincerity: how to gauge it, what role it plays in legal proceedings, and when it is relevant to pastoral caregiving. One group member offered that they had a “bias toward sincerity,” that is, they and several others around the table were inclined to take someone at their word that a belief or practice was sincerely important to them. Judges and lawyers, however, are not always so inclined.

   • Judges mainly test sincerity by focusing on the weight of a belief or practice within an overall tradition. As many group members pointed out however, this test does a disservice to those beliefs and practices that may not be central to a religious tradition or only relevant or known to a small group of adherents. Additionally, chaplains and lawyers in the group reported that racial and religious minorities are more systemically distrusted on this and many other fronts.

   • The idea of “sincerity” and, importantly, “insincerity,” can also trickle down to religious organizations and communities, as noted by group members working in corrections and re-entry spaces. Prioritizing “sincerity” runs the risk of a person being shunned by supportive community and suffering discretionary denials of religious services.

2. Through the conversation, there appeared seemingly natural openings for chaplains and religious volunteers to help, even marginally, with demystifying some legal processes and offering connections to external legal organizations. However, whether chaplains should take these opportunities was contentious. chaplains and legal advice…when to offer help and when to hold back. is it even right for chaplains to try and take a more advocacy-focused role? helping manage pro se (self-brought) litigation? sometimes chaplains’ distance from the law IS the help.

   • Each group member had a slightly different take on if it was right for chaplains to take a more advocacy focused role, whether helping those incarcerated litigate pro se (self-initiated) cases or assist in parole processes. Many argued that a chaplain’s primary role was not a disseminator of resources and sometimes a chaplain’s distance from the law and the state was the most helpful aspect of their care. Moreover, chaplains expressed concern about burnout from managing emotional labor, service providing, and sustained advocacy.

3. This burnout could be alleviated or prevented by a casework model for correctional chaplaincy akin to that common in hospitals. The group discussed a potential system where wraparound services from arrest through re-entry included chaplains, social workers, and lawyers who remained in contact with each other, adjusting each of their services as needed.

   • While this kind of model would require a systematic overhaul, small-scale steps could be taken to move existing processes closer to it, including chaplains proactively building relationships with community re-entry organizations and external religious organizations utilizing chaplains’ expertise when taking up prison reform advocacy.