Caught on Camera

Across Guatemala City, Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers warehouse users (often against their will) in the name of salvation. This essay, in response, details how pastors deploy digital media to assess a user’s relative fitness for a Christian life. Of particular interest is how pastors insist that photographs and videos allow the faithful to read users for signs of the soul. Contributing to the criminalization and mass incarceration of drug users, these images organize the outer edges of today’s war on drugs.