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Prison Life: Pain, Resistance, and Purpose
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Offering for consideration a series of case studies ranging from the H Blocks in Northern Ireland in the 1990s to today’s supermax—with discursions to Texas and Ethiopia—Prison Life moves beyond the traditional “society of captives” literature to a set of understandings that are comparative, sensitive to context, and rooted in individual experiences. The book describes how order is generated and maintained, how daily life is executed, and how meaning is found in a variety of environments that all have the same function—incarceration—but discharge it very differently. Sense-making is at the heart of the human endeavor and in each prison case study the carceral experience is examined through the story of a man who was molded by, and in return molded, the institution that held him. This way, the personal is connected to the social in ways that are reciprocally illuminating. Prison Life is unusual in its use of photographs, drawings, pen portraits, and sociograms in addition to the graphs and tables that typically adorn the pages of academic treatises.
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