Life beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2024).

One day, the prison system will burn to ash. Remains of steel and concrete, tempered glass and barbed wire, piled to the sky, popping, crackling, hissing, in smoldering heaps. This future promise, impossible as it is to believe, is a key takeaway in Life beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s begin somewhere more familiar.

The story we know of the US prison system (and the policing that fills it) has been told with big numbers and federal policy histories: 2.3 million people are currently caged (95 percent of whom never stood trial). 3.9 million people are on probation or parole. 70 million people with criminal convictions. 40-60 percent of incarcerated people live with mental illness. 60-70 percent of incarcerated people lived in poverty prior to arrest. Black people are incarcerated at 6 times the rate of white people. 1 new prison was built every 10 days across the 1990s. 83 percent of people released are re-incarcerated within 9 years. Local police officers kill 3 people a day with near total impunity. The 1986 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. The 1994 Crime Bill. 3 strikes. Mandatory minimum sentencing. The numbers, like a horror story monster, just keep coming.

In viewing the prison system (and the policing that fills it) only through big numbers and federal policy histories, however, we are left with two familiar problems: the experiences, ambitions, and ideas for change of people who live and labor in and around US prisons are entirely ignored; and, relatedly, any so-called solutions for ending (or dramatically reforming) the system are imagined exclusively at the federal level.

But what might be learned, and what ideas for building new futures might be imagined, when we climb down from the perch of big numbers and federal policies? Way, way down to the ground level, where people live, and where prison facilities operate as part of the local community?

Life beside Bars explores exactly this. It centers a rural, out-of-the-way place, Cumberland County, New Jersey, where three state prisons, one federal prison, and a regional jail cage more than 6,400 people each and every day. It opens a local history of human confinement that stretches back 400 years, establishing a structural connection between today’s prisons and the region’s past systems of confinement: Lenape genocide, land theft, and reservations; African-descended chattel slavery; Jim Crow segregation and lynching; and, Japanese American WWII labor camps. By grounding the historical perspective in the region’s perpetual use of confinement across time, rather than abstracting the analysis to the national prison system, two historical truths come to light: the region’s political economy has always required a system of human confinement, largely based on racial difference; and, each one of these systems of confinement has always, eventually, ended. Today’s prisons are no different. One day, they will burn to ash.

But this future, and the regional history it is based upon, serves only as the backdrop.The book’s main feature comes alive through 18 ethnographic vignettes written in vivid, narrative form. The vignettes are organized around three major themes—Domination, Resistance, and To-the-side—and they feature a diverse range of people who live and labor in Cumberland County, from upper class landowning families who founded the town to public defenders who fight for the most vulnerable to recently paroled people stitching life together one hour at a time.

We come to learn that no resident, irrespective of class, race, and gender, is free of the prisons’ sprawling reach. Prisons, like past systems, engulf any and everything within their orbit, driving the local economy, bending electoral politics, and dominating everyday life. As the vignettes build, though, we also learn an alternative history happening off to the side, where we encounter the unruly and unexpected ways that people resist, get by, make money, find joy, and, most especially, build radical social life in the small, unseen spaces beside large-scale confinement.

Life beside Bars complicates the wider historical, political-economic, and legal framing of the US prison buildup, as it provides a kaleidoscope of possibilities and political orientations, rooted in daily life, for theorizing and organizing alternative paths on our way to a future free of prisons (and the policing that fills them).

heath pearson is an assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology and Justice & Peace Studies at Georgetown University. His first book, Life beside Bars: Confinement & Capital in an American Prison Town, is available from Duke University Press, 2024. He is currently at work on a book project titled Streaming Man: Satellite TV & The Reproduction of Law, Order, & Masculinity. He is the book and media reviews editor at Current Anthropology.