The Prison out of Place: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America

The Prison Out of Place offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations-including property, work, gender and race-enacted across various spatial forms and landscapes within American life. Arguing that the prison be considered as more than just a building, bound to the ostensibly closed circuit of crime and punishment, the book investigates the production of carceral power at various sites, from buses to coalfields, and cities in decline to financial urban hubs, in order to demonstrate how the organization of carceral space is ideologically and materially grounded in the neoliberal restructurings of racial capitalism. In doing so, it challenges both the common sense idea of prisons as responses to the problem of crime, and attachments to punishment as the relevant measure of criminal justice policy.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.