"A Solitary Lifetime Prisoner": Kierkegaard and the Problem of Prison Reform

As Kierkegaard deemed imprisonment to be an evil (et onde), this paper aims to begin a dialogue on Kierkegaard and prison reform in three ways: first, through a review of scholarship related to Kierkegaard and incarceration; second, by situating Kierkegaard in recent discussions on chaplaincy, pastoral care, and theological education in prisons; and thirdly, through a close reading of ideas on the demonic, the imprisoned self, and the crowd in Kierkegaard’s writings. Ultimately, I intend to show the contributions Kierkegaard can make to debates on prison reform in the United States and globally. Whereas religious scholars, philosophers, legalists, and ethicists have written extensively on punishment, prisons, and prison reform through the work of thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Marx, and certainly Foucault, the scholarship is less developed in the context of Kierkegaard’s ideas (see, for example, Sarah Williams Holtman’s “A Kantian Approach to Prison Reform”). This absence, and the continued search for viable solutions, only increases the relevance of and need to bring Kierkegaard into the dialogue on a substantive moral concern that is becoming even more precarious and pronounced. Recent executive orders have restored the U.S. government’s use of private, for-profit prisons and required that all transgender women in prisons be moved to male institutions. Such decisions defy the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ stated mission to “provide more progressive and humane care” in its carceral practices. In New York’s infamous Riker’s Island jail complex, the state has been found in contempt for “failing to stem violence and excessive force.” Although California’s prison population has decreased by 30,000 since the pandemic, the state continues to authorize billions of dollars—$15 billion in 2025—to maintain its prison system, reinforcing the notion that the state relies on the prison for far more than the rehabilitation of human beings. How might Kierkegaard offer even a limited set of possibilities for addressing the myriad concerns facing societies that wish to address issues of justice, harm, punishment, incarceration, rehabilitation, and social reintegration?

Kierkegaard and Prisons

Writing on Kierkegaard and prisons includes work focused on his metaphorical use of the prison in his writing and work that applies Kierkegaard’s ideas to programs and teaching with imprisoned human beings. French social theorist Michel Foucault referred to the Panopticon penitentiary designed by Jeremy Bentham as a “a privileged place for experiments on men.” Paul Bove, in an article titled, “The Penitentiary of Reflection: Søren Kierkegaard and Critical Activity,” argues that “Kierkegaard identifies the social equivalent of the panopticon’s internalization of regulation and authority as the means by which his reflective age extends itself.” For Bove, the individual subject to surveillance in the Panopticon mirrors Kierkegaard’s use of the “penitentiary as a metaphor to describe the entrapment of even the individual who hopes to rebel against the forces of alienation and oppression.” In an article titled, “A Phenomenology of Authenticity in Prison Life: Kierkegaard and the Paradox of Freedom,” Hazel Marie Vitales, et al, move Kierkegaard’s prison metaphor from theory to practice, relying on Kierkegaard to discuss the crisis of faith encountered by imprisoned human beings at New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa City, Philippines. I will draw from these and other examples of scholars writing about Kierkegaard and prisons to contextualize my paper and ultimate claim advancing the idea of Kierkegaard as a thinker we can use to ask questions about prison reform. 

Religion in Prisons

Emil Marcussen was born in Tønder, Denmark, in 1858. By 1921, he found himself working as a chaplain and regularly preaching to incarcerated persons at San Quentin Prison in California (the prison officially opened in the year before Kierkegaard’s death). Today the state of California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation employs 125 chaplains, about 3 to 5 in each of its prisons. Their charge is “to provide spiritual and moral guidance to those behind bars.” Chaplains, religious teaching, religious practice, are central to prison life. More than 1,500 chaplains work in prisons nationally and thousands more throughout the world. According to the most recent Pew research, 73 percent of chaplains surveyed nationally believe religious-based programs are critical to rehabilitative efforts. Recent books on the subject of religion in prison include Sarah F. Farmer’s Restorative Hope: Creating Space for Connection in Women’s Prisons and Rachelle Green’s Learning to Live: Prison, Pedagogy, and Theological Education. Green examines “how people understand, question, and/or doubt God’s activity in contexts of confinement and domination … human responsibility, how we respond to and participate with God’s activity in prison.” Given that Kierkegaard would have been suspicious of organized religious programming in prisons, how can Kierkegaard’s ideas contribute to the many ways in which religion shows up inside of carceral spaces?

Reading the Prison in Kierkegaard’s Writings 

Here, I ask the question, “Is Kierkegaard’s aesthete incarcerated?” Does the metaphoric use of the prison in Either-Or inversely open the text for use as a means to prevent acts of evil and human incarceration, benefit the anguished incarcerated human being with , and remind the human being who has served their sentence to never again relinquish their freedom? Similarly, are Kierkegaard’s writing on evil, the demonic, the criminal, and “the man of inclosing reserve” in The Concept of Anxiety available for movement beyond abstraction and into conversations on crime and punishment in society? Works of Love is a widely used text in pastoral care and theological education. Kierkegaard turns to the prison metaphor in this work, noting that the prisoner in the narrowest prison (det snevreste Fængsel) is not imprisoned as one is imprisoned in the idea of God. Kierkegaard is expressing an idea about God everywhere through the metaphor of the prisoner and the prisoner’s dilemma. Is it possible to extract from Kierkegaard’s metaphoric use of the prison a material prison praxis that can be applied to carceral problem facing diverse societies? By reading the prison in Kierkegaard, we can obtain invaluable lessons for prison reform.