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". 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.
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