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The involvement of women in a planned attack in Paris in September 2016, as well as various individuals returning from Syria, seems to have led penitentiary authorities to rethink their policies to fight against ‘radicalisation’, which up until now were only geared towards male inmates. In order to understand this change in the framing of this issue, we suggest returning to some ethnographic material collected in 2011-2012 as part of a study of religion in prison in eight penitentiary institutions, including three which had female inmates. We will thus show how the way in which female violence is understood as well as the way in which their imprisonment is conceived, strongly condition the representations of women’s religiousness as unthreatening. We also highlight certain consequences of this gendered management of religious ‘risk’ in prison.