Love, Rehabilitation, and Professionalization: The Women’s Correctional House in Santiago under the Good Shepherd Congregation (1962-1996)

Abstract

This article analyses rehabilitation in the Women’s Correctional House in Santiago, Chile, under the administration of the Good Shepherd congregation. It first profiles the women –prisoners, guards, and nuns– who populated the prison between its move to a new site in 1962 and the handover of the prison to the state prison service in 1996. It then tracks the sisters’ rehabilitation as an earthly, motherly love designed to lead prisoners to God’s redemptive love. Finally, the paper reveals how the nuns adapted this insular nineteenth-century “mission of love” to a change in prisoner profile and the professionalization of prison service staff in the second half of the twentieth century by incorporating external and scientific expertise into the project to evangelize prisoners.