Rutgers University Press
Prison and Social Death
Prison and Social Death
Regular price
€32,95 EUR
Regular price
Sale price
€32,95 EUR
Unit price
per
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Couldn't load pickup availability
The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson's term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer "social death." In Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families.
Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and children. Moreover, this isolation of people in prison renders them highly vulnerable to other forms of violence, including sexual violence. Price stresses that the violence they face goes beyond physical abuse by prison guards and it involves institutionalized forms of mistreatment, ranging from abysmally poor health care to routine practices that are arguably abusive, such as pat-downs, cavity searches, and the shackling of pregnant women. And social death does not end with prison. The condition is permanent, following people after they are released from prison. Finding housing, employment, receiving social welfare benefits, and regaining voting rights are all hindered by various legal and other hurdles. The mechanisms of social death, Price shows, are also informal and cultural. Ex-prisoners face numerous forms of distrust and are permanently stigmatized by other citizens around them.
A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.
Author: Joshua M. Price
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 07/01/2015
Pages: 212
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.49d
ISBN: 9780813565576
Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2016
Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and children. Moreover, this isolation of people in prison renders them highly vulnerable to other forms of violence, including sexual violence. Price stresses that the violence they face goes beyond physical abuse by prison guards and it involves institutionalized forms of mistreatment, ranging from abysmally poor health care to routine practices that are arguably abusive, such as pat-downs, cavity searches, and the shackling of pregnant women. And social death does not end with prison. The condition is permanent, following people after they are released from prison. Finding housing, employment, receiving social welfare benefits, and regaining voting rights are all hindered by various legal and other hurdles. The mechanisms of social death, Price shows, are also informal and cultural. Ex-prisoners face numerous forms of distrust and are permanently stigmatized by other citizens around them.
A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.
Author: Joshua M. Price
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 07/01/2015
Pages: 212
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.49d
ISBN: 9780813565576
Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2016
About the Author
JOSHUA M. PRICE is an associate professor of sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and the author of Structural Violence: Hidden Brutality in the Lives of Women. He is the director of the Broome County Jail Health Project, based in upstate New York.
