Prisoners and Debt Collectors

This article examines how Brazil's Valley of the Dawn religious movement created an innovative ritual practice called the prisão (prison) that adapts elements of state legal systems while operating within a fundamentally different understanding of justice. Drawing on ethnographic data, I demonstrate how this ritual incorporates familiar aspects of state legal proceedings – formal roles, staged testimony, and ritualised judgements – and reframes them through spiritual concepts of karma, reincarnation, metaphysical debt, healing, and redemption. Rather than replacing or opposing formal state justice systems, the prison ritual operates alongside them, addressing spiritual and communal dimensions of harm and reconciliation that lie beyond the scope of conventional legal processes. Through analysis of participants’ experiences, I argue that this ‘spiritual justice system’ demonstrates how procedural borrowing from state institutions can transform familiar legal forms into vehicles for converting adversarial proceedings designed to establish guilt into collaborative processes aimed at spiritual reconciliation and community healing

Adversarial system · Debt · Economic Justice · Ethnography · Prison · Scope (computer science · State (computer science · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Religion and Society in Latin America