Part One considers the first claim. Chapter 1 examines plea bargaining's secularization of Puritan confession rituals. Though plea bargains shed the explicitly theological language of Puritan censure rituals, they retained their power to individualize and essentialize participants. Chapter 2 highlights the centrality of the ritual structure of the courtroom and the legal fiction of freedom in the construction of ritual participants as carceral bodies. Chapter 3 considers the figure of the poor Black man as a means of uncovering the symbolic order that links race, gender, and class to guilt, concluding that plea bargaining is one specific point in the carceral system in which symbols of guilt are imputed to the individual who confesses. The upshot is the formation of "carceral bodies" who are deemed essentially guilty and worthy of dehumanizing punishment.

Part Two turns to the second claim. Chapter 4 explores the Christian apophatic tradition to show the widespread agreement of apophatic theologians regarding the unknowability of the human being and its necessary relations to divine, human, and non-human others. Analyzing the apophatic thought of Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Howard Thurman, and Catherine Keller, it shows that apophatic anthropology is a useful resource for challenging the carceral anthropology embedded in plea bargaining. Chapter 5 advocates for the practice of robust confession rituals based on the concepts, symbols, norms, and values of apophatic anthropology. Transformative and restorative justice rituals practiced by abolitionists resonate strongly with apophatic insights, offering models to help us imagine and so begin to construct a world without plea bargains and without carceral bodies.