Life beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town

by Heath Pearson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478060130
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/04/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Heath Pearson is Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University.

Table of Contents

Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction. Social Life to the Side  1
I. Domination
1. Old Man Tilley & the Land  15
2. Big Tim & Mrs. Taylor  23
3. The Chief & Bigfoot  31
4. Jon and the Glittery Crow  41
5. Carl & Waking Bakery  50
6. The Sheepdog Who Cried Wolf  70
Conveyance 1  70
II. Resistance
7. Ms. Reid & Her Boy  77
8. Ten & Two: How a Civil Rights Organization Fights Police Work  83
9. Mr. Cantale & the Community  90
10. Fred, Ken & Intensive Supervision  101
11. Ruthie at Lunch  113
12. Seymour Green & Political Party(ing)  120
Conveyance II  129
III. To-the-Side
13. Fred & the Declaration of Independence  135
14. Herc & Prison on the Outside  139
15. The Lawyers and the Amish Market  152
16. The Spot Is an Alternative Space  160
17. Henrietta & Annie: Forty-Five Minutes from Life  173
18. Shakes & the Pace of Connection  180
Conveyance III  188
Epilogue  191
Appendix I. Local History of Confinement with Archival Pictures  195
Appendix II. Demographic Details of People in Vignettes  203
Appendix III. Hand-Drawn Pictographs of Arguments Sketched Prior to Writing the Book  205
Notes  211
Bibliography  221
Index  223

What People are Saying About This

Black and Blur - Fred Moten

"Life beside Bars feels like a kind of dramatic poetry in which obscure sociality is not portrayed but enacted. Heath Pearson listens with fervent sophistication. He treats the people who work in a prison town with the kind of intellectual care that must accompany the deepest commitment to the liberation of the imprisoned, letting us know that attunement to common life is what makes possible the most rigorous critique of its institutional violation."

Editorial Reviews

“Heath Pearson’s ethnographic voice is tightly attuned to the politics of living, as he deliberately rejects and excises styles and conventions of liberal humanism as a force in tight collusion with capitalism. This is a major accomplishment in and of itself, while his theorization of prisons is powerful. The wild array of stories from characters of all kinds in this carefully crafted book makes a significant point; I learned something of how people live. The effect of this book is visceral.

The Hundreds - Kathleen Stewart

"Life beside Bars feels like a kind of dramatic poetry in which obscure sociality is not portrayed but enacted. heath pearson listens with fervent sophistication. He treats the people who work in a prison town with the kind of intellectual care that must accompany the deepest commitment to the liberation of the imprisoned, letting us know that attunement to common life is what makes possible the most rigorous critique of its institutional violation."—Fred Moten, author of Black and Blur

From the Publisher