Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America

From broken-window policing in Detroit to prison-building in Appalachia, exploring the expansion of the carceral state and its oppressive social relations into everyday life

Prison Land offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations—including property, work, gender, and race—enacted across various landscapes of American life. Prisons, Brett Story shows, are more than just buildings of incarceration bound to cycles of crime and punishment. Instead, she investigates the production of carceral power at a range of sites, from buses to coalfields and from blighted cities to urban financial hubs, to demonstrate how the organization of carceral space is ideologically and materially grounded in racial capitalism.

Story’s critically acclaimed film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is based on the same research that informs this book. In both, Story takes an expansive view of what constitutes contemporary carceral space, interrogating the ways in which racial capitalism is reproduced and for which police technologies of containment and control are employed. By framing the prison as a set of social relations, Prison Land forces us to confront the production of new carceral forms that go well beyond the prison system. In doing so, it profoundly undermines both conventional ideas of prisons as logical responses to the problem of crime and attachment to punishment as the relevant measure of a transformed criminal justice system. 

• Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series)
• All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence (Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History)
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
• Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
• Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair
• Are Prisons Obsolete?
• The End of Policing
• Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States
• How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide (Covers May vary)