Book Review: Prison and social death

• Author: Jennifer Stevens
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734016816652119
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

violent and nonviolent), and a host of other microlevel beliefs. Although the author set out to discern

differences among violent and nonviolent individuals’ beliefs, she identified more similarities than

differences among their cognitive maps. However, this finding is predicated on the methods she used

and restricted to her sample of 27 individuals across these c omparison groups. Moreover, it is

difficult to draw firm conclusions from this work, as the author did not make obvious how she

achieved reliability across her coding scheme (i.e., she was the sole interviewer, coder, and inter-

preter of themes) nor demonstrate consistency across a large enough sample of relevant comparison

groups (e.g., Muslims in Germany nor non-Muslims in Egypt were not considered). Thus, the

primary contribution of Whether to Kill is the excellent and detailed treatment of CMA both in its

textual analysis and in its computation forms. She deserves immense credit for the courage and

determination displayed in her research effort.

Price, J. M. (2015).

Prison and social death. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 193 pp. $25.95, ISBN 978-0-8135-6557-6.

Reviewed by: Jennifer Stevens, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016816652119

In Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price crosses the ‘‘abyssal divide’’ to explore the concept of

social death through imprisonment. Price extends Santos’ (2007, 2014) concept of the abyssal divide

to describe the social distance between free society and those who are incarcerated. When moving

from his university work to interviewing inmates at the Broome County Correctional Facility, Price

describes regularly crossing this divide as part of a research project to investigate the health-care

practices of the jail. The project originated with the local branch of the NAACP, which had received

several complaints about health care within the facility. After attending an organizational meeting,

Price was invited to conduct interviews with inmates who had complained about their conditions.

Price and his research team conducted interviews with 150 people at the jail from 2004 to 2007.

After the jail restricted the team’s visits in 2007, Price shifted his focus to the challenges of reentry

into society by interviewing over 20 people who had been incarcerated. Interestingly, while the book

attempts to explore social death as it relates to prison, the majority of interviewees were held in a

county jail. While Price acknowledges that the conditions of incarceration may be similar for those

in jail and prison, the social and legal consequences are more severe for those who serve time in

prison.

Part I of the book focuses on the application of the concept of social death to the incarceration

experience. Price claims that incarceration gives way not only to civil death, which is the loss of

legal rights and privileges, but also to social death. Orlando Patterson (1982) used the term social

death to describe the experience of the enslaved. Patterson claimed that slaves experienced systema-

tic violence, humiliation, and severed relationships from family members and ancestors, otherwise

known as natal alienation. In Price’s extension of this concept to the incarcerated, he claims that the

isolation of incarceration severs the ties between families and creates hardships not only for the

inmates but also for their families. Being incarcerated can prevent parents from making decisions in

their own children’s lives and deprives them of the opportunity to intervene when children are being

mistreated. Additionally, the reproductive choices of incarcerated women are undermined by pro-

hibiting breast-feeding, preventing abortions, shackling pregnant women, and denying preventive

care. Price also discusses how correctional facilities systematically harass and humiliate inmates

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