Life beside Bars
eBook - PDF

Life beside Bars

Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town

  1. 224 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Life beside Bars

Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town

About this book

In Life beside Bars, Heath Pearson showcases dynamic, interdependent community as the best hope for undoing the systems of confinement that reproduce capital in Cumberland County, New Jersey—a place that is home to three state prisons, one federal prison, and the regional jail. Pearson places today's prisons within the region's longer history of Lenape genocide, chattel slavery, Japanese American labor camps, and other forms of racialized punishment and carceral control. From this vantage, prisons appear not as the structural fix for the region's failed political economy but as a continuation of the carceral principle that has always sustained it. This ongoing use of confinement, though, is merely the backdrop. Through ethnographic vignettes written in story form, Pearson offers an alternative history of the unruly and unexpected ways that people resist, get by, make money, find joy, and build radical social life in the small, unseen spaces beside large-scale confinement. As such, Pearson enriches our understanding of daily life in and around prisons—in any American community—while providing a kaleidoscope of possibilities for theorizing and organizing alternative paths.

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Yes, you can access Life beside Bars by Heath Pearson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Criminology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Preface
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Introduction. Social Life to the Side
  6. I. Domination
  7. II. Resistance
  8. III. To-The-Side
  9. Epilogue
  10. Appendix I. Local History of Confinement with Archival Pictures
  11. Appendix II. Demographic Details of People in Vignettes
  12. Appendix III. Hand-Drawn Pictographs of Arguments Sketched Prior to Writing the Book
  13. Notes
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index