A01=Joshua M. Price
abusive routine practices
activism
American prison
Author_Joshua M. Price
Broome County Jail Health Project
Category=JKVP
civil rights activism
convicts
Critical Issues in Crime and Society
Critical Issues in Crime and Society series
employment
eq_bestseller
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
excessive damage
housing
humiliation
incarceration
institutionalized forms of mistreatment
isolation of slavery
jail
JOSHUA M. PRICE
parolees
poor health care
prison
Prison and Social Death
regaining voting rights
separation
separation from community
separation from family
social death
social research
social welfare benefits
sociology
solidarity
systematic violence
unnecessary damage
Product details
- ISBN 9780813565576
- Weight: 286g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jul 2015
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
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.
