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  • Prison Town ? Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York

    Prison Town ? Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York by Morrell, Andrea R.;

    Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York

    Series: Anthropology of Contemporary North America;

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      • Publisher's listprice GBP 82.00
      • The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.

        41 500 Ft (39 524 Ft + 5% VAT)
      • Discount 10% (cc. 4 150 Ft off)
      • Discounted price 37 350 Ft (35 572 Ft + 5% VAT)

    41 500 Ft

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    Availability

    Estimated delivery time: In stock at the publisher, but not at Prospero's office. Delivery time approx. 3-5 weeks.
    Not in stock at Prospero.

    Why don't you give exact delivery time?

    Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.

    Product details:

    • Publisher U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
    • Date of Publication 1 June 2025
    • Number of Volumes Cloth Over Boards

    • ISBN 9781496239020
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages178 pages
    • Size 171x232x17 mm
    • Weight 412 g
    • Language English
    • Illustrations 7 photographs, 1 illustration, 1 table, index
    • 700

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    Short description:

    Andrea R. Morrell shows that despite the barriers aimed at separating incarcerated and free residents of Elmira, New York, the town’s two prisons extended far beyond their walls, intricately connecting the two populations.

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    Long description:

    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.
     

    Prison Town breaks new ground in the study of the carceral state in rural America. Fiercely analytical and with compelling personal throughlines, Prison Town examines Elmira as a set of relationships forged across the porous borders supposedly separating state and capital as well as institution and community. Morrell’s ethnography reveals how Elmirans make sense of their changing community and analyzes the political and economic changes that contoured the town (and other places like it) to accept prisons as legitimate forms of development. In the process, Prison Town sheds new light on the racializing and immiserating consequences of prison building for rural communities.”—Judah Schept, author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia

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