A01=Andrea R. Morrell
American Studies
anthropology
Author_Andrea R. Morrell
carceral studies
Category=JHMC
Category=JKV
Category=NHK
Category=WQH
criminology
Critical Criminology
Critical Prison Studies
Elmira Correctional Facility
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic studies
Labor History
Northeastern US
prison studies
Race and Ethnicity in the United States
racial capitalism
racialization
rural economicdevelopment
Southport Correctional Facility
Urban Anthropology
Product details
- ISBN 9781496239020
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 2025
- Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Elmira, a town of about twenty-six thousand people in central New York, is in some ways a typical town-with quiet, tree-lined residential streets, an art museum, local coffee shops, and a small college. The city, however, is best known as home to Elmira Correctional Facility and, until its closure in March 2022, the Southport Correctional Facility. Hundreds of locals have worked at the prisons, the town plays host to visitors of the incarcerated, and local medical institutions provide treatment to prisoners. The prisons and Elmira are inseparable.
In Prison Town Andrea R. Morrell illustrates the converging and shifting fault lines of race and class through a portrait of a prison town undergoing deindustrialization as it chooses the path of prison expansion. In this ethnography, Morrell highlights the contradictions of prison work as work that allows a middle-class salary and lifestyle but trades in other forms of stigma. Guards, prisoners, prisoners’ families, and meager amounts of money and care work travel through spaces of free and unfree via the porous borders between prison and town. As Morrell captures the rapid expansion of the carceral state into upstate New York from the perspective of a small city with two prisons, she demonstrates how the prison system’s racialized, gendered, and classed dispossession has crossed its own porous borders into the city of Elmira.
In Prison Town Andrea R. Morrell illustrates the converging and shifting fault lines of race and class through a portrait of a prison town undergoing deindustrialization as it chooses the path of prison expansion. In this ethnography, Morrell highlights the contradictions of prison work as work that allows a middle-class salary and lifestyle but trades in other forms of stigma. Guards, prisoners, prisoners’ families, and meager amounts of money and care work travel through spaces of free and unfree via the porous borders between prison and town. As Morrell captures the rapid expansion of the carceral state into upstate New York from the perspective of a small city with two prisons, she demonstrates how the prison system’s racialized, gendered, and classed dispossession has crossed its own porous borders into the city of Elmira.
Andrea R. Morrell is an associate professor of anthropology at Guttman Community College, City University of New York.
