Abstract
Sarah Farmer’s insightful new book examines how women in the carceral continuum cultivate and sustain hope in a system oriented toward their confinement. Drawing from a decade of prison teaching experience and interviews with ten formerly incarcerated women, F. reveals that hope functions as an active, mobilizing force rather than a passive feeling. For these women, hope becomes a kinetic response to the stasis imposed by incarceration.
F. documents three key strategies these women employ: developing personal resilience techniques, nurturing meaningful relationships within the walls of prison, and resisting dehumanization through deliberate identity formation. The book concludes by both describing and prescribing F.’s “restorative hope pedagogy,” a framework that supports these essential practices of resilience, relationship-building, and self-authorship.
F.’s vision of hope is strikingly sacramental. For these incarcerated women, hope is not primarily anchored in ethereal future goals. Instead, it is mediated through ordinary objects, experiences, and relationships that preserve life in a death-dealing environment. Indigo embodies resistance through forbidden DIY nail polish, defying prison’s enforced conformity (64). A small vent becomes the sacred channel through which Kristi and Nona offer mutual support across solitary confinement cells (81–82). For Eden, a mirror reveals not a “criminal” but “a creation of God”—reflecting the self-transformation fostered by her theology course (125). These are not intellectual abstractions but embodied encounters with hope, testifying to the life-sustaining grace operating in these women’s lives.
F.’s analysis is compelling. Her restorative hope pedagogy—utilizing contemplative practices, tools for self-discovery and self-affirmation, relationship-building, and engagement with the arts—offers valuable approaches for diverse educational settings beyond prisons. While she effectively outlines this theologically informed process, questions remain about its substance: What specifically makes it theological? What texts ground it? Is it exclusively Christian or adaptable across different religious traditions and philosophies? Addressing these questions would clarify how this pedagogy might transfer to other contexts.
Overall, Restorative Hope is a poignant and thought-provoking qualitative study offering astute reflections on human dignity, the nature of sin, and pathways to flourishing under duress. It would be especially useful for ministry students, theological educators, and prison chaplains.