Open AccessWORK WITHOUT LABOR: Life in the Surround of a Rural Prison Town
Author(s) -
PEARSON HEATH
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
cultural anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.669
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 1548-1360
pISSN - 0886-7356
DOI - 10.14506/ca36.2.01
Subject(s) - prison , boom , solitary confinement , space (punctuation) , work (physics) , white (mutation) , sociology , political science , criminology , engineering , mechanical engineering , biochemistry , chemistry , environmental engineering , gene , linguistics , philosophy
This article challenges the idea that the U.S. prison boom is a federally driven fix. By assembling a two‐hundred‐year regional history of Cliptown, New Jersey—a rural town with five prisons and three police departments—the article indicates that prisons appear not as an external fix but as the most recent technological iteration of a homegrown system that has always functioned to capture labor through white supremacist domination. Locally historicizing the evolution of this dominating system, however, refuses to concede the final word to prisons and earlier confinement technologies, concluding, instead, in an alternative space that exceeds the capture of confinement, where formerly incarcerated people collaborate to expand freedoms and to practice being unavailable for confinement's servitude.