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.
