Prison and Social Death / / Joshua M. Price.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Rutgers University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Price, Joshua M.,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2015]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Critical Issues in Crime and Society
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (212 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Part I. Elements of Social Death -- 1. Crossing the Abyss: The Study of Social Death -- 2. Natal Alienation -- 3. Humiliation -- Part II. Method and a History of Social Death -- 4. Dissemblance and Creativity: Toward a Methodology for Studying State Violence -- 5. Racism, Prison, and the Legacies of Slavery -- 6. The Birth of the Penitentiary -- Part III. Abolition Democracy -- 7. "Doesn't Everyone Know Someone in Prison or on Parole?" -- 8. Spirit Murder: Reentry, Dispossession, and Enduring Stigma -- 9. States of Grace: Social Life against Social Death -- 10. Conclusion: Failure and Abolition Democracy -- Notes -- References -- Index -- About the Author