Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York - Paperback

$48.60

Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York - Paperback

Name: Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York - Paperback
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9781496243119
Price: 48.60 USD
Availability: InStock

by Andrea R. Morrell

$48.60

Book Overview

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.

ISBN	9781496243119
Author	Andrea R. Morrell
Publisher	University of Nebraska Press
Genre	History and Education
Format	Paperback
Published	June 2025
Language	ENG- English
Pages	178
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print