Much attention has been given to the relationships between Christian theologies and the various aspects of the American prison-industrial complex. However, no theologian has undertaken an analysis of the plea bargain, despite its centrality in the formation, condemnation, and incarceration of criminalized bodies. My dissertation addresses this gap by arguing that plea bargaining should be understood as a theologico-political ritual analogous to Christian rituals of confession of sins and, thus, as a practice requiring a theological response. I argue, first, that the secular ritual of plea bargaining is similar to Christian confession rituals in both structure and function. Undergirded by a theological anthropology that establishes the human as being uniquely capable of vocalizing their truest self, the defendant’s admission of wrongdoing in the plea bargain conceptualizes, constructs, and condemns them as a criminal with an essential relation to their crimes. The plea bargain’s criminalization of those who confess simultaneously perpetuates the dehumanized figure of the raced, sexed, gendered, classed, and disabled criminal and absolves the criminal justice system of responsibility for its role in the structural conditions that relegate these figures to the margins of society. Second, I propose a theological alternative to the theo-logic of the plea bargain by staging a dialogue with the Christian apophatic tradition, which insists upon the unknowability of the divine essence and the ultimate failure of human speech about it. I develop an apophatic anthropology that extends the unknowability of the divine to the human being existing in infinite relation to divine, human and nonhuman others. Apophatic anthropology challenges the legal concept of personhood that undergirds the plea bargaining ritual and provides theological weight and ritual depth to the alternative models of confession–and of subject formation–advocated by prison abolitionists.