Prison and Social Death J.M. Price. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press (2015) 193pp. $25.95pb ISBN 978‐0‐8135‐6557‐6

In Prison and Social Death, Joshua M. Price draws on several years of activism and grassroots participatory research related to the health care of imprisoned people in upstate New York. The book provides rich illustration of the tragic realities of medical treatment and other material conditions of prison life that are drawn from his work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It is not, however, merely a case study of the work of the NAACP nor a localised account of a few prisons that are poorly managed and under-resourced. Price draws connections between numerous examples of patently inhumane treatment that are commonplace in prisons and the notion of ‘social death’. It is in this connection that Price makes a substantial contribution to understandings of what the use of imprisonment tangibly means – for those directly subjected to it, their families and for societies that demand imprisonment as their favoured form of criminal justice sanction. The book is divided into three parts and ten chapters. In Part One, comprising three chapters, Price sets out the concept of social death, including its origins and constituent elements. In Part Two, through a further three chapters, the book explores the method and history of ‘social death’ in the United States, including the roles of racism and legacies of slavery in establishing the normalisation of state violence through the use of imprisonment. In the final section, Part Three, entitled ‘Abolition Democracy’, three substantive chapters utilise post-imprisonment experiences to examine the social fragmentation, isolation and enduring nature of ‘social death’ that follows the stigmatised ex-prisoner into the community. The final, concluding, chapter takes stock of what has been brought to light about the use and practices of imprisonment in the narratives and experiences catalogued by Price and the work of the NAACP. Whilst the book ends on a somewhat ambivalent and, perhaps, hopeless, tone, it also concludes with some useful considerations on prison abolition – and the commitment to fundamental social change that abolition would require. Price's use and exploration of the concept of ‘social death’ is especially fruitful. He draws on the concept, as defined and explored by Orlando Patterson and his analysis of slavery, and identifies its three aspects: (i) systematic violence; (ii) generalised humiliating treatment; and (iii) ‘natal alienation’. Each of these aspects of social death, Price argues, are intrinsic and fundamental features of modern imprisonment. The term ‘natal alienation’ refers to severance from ancestors, relatives and children. Importantly for Price's work and interest in health care, the concept of natal alienation, as Price states, ‘allows us to explain the implications of incarceration for reproductive health and reproductive justice’ (pp.5–6). Price's considerations of the mistreatment of people in prison from pregnant women, to transgendered people, to men unable to care for their families on the outside are all vividly examined through the lens of natal alienation. Moreover, this concept provides a powerful analytical device for viewing, in stark relief, the experience of not just those imprisoned but also the helplessness and vicarious punishments of their families and communities that result from being unable to protect your loved one from the ravages of the state violence that is imprisonment. As Price notes: ‘According to a common sense view in the United States, implicitly upheld by liberal individualism, prison harms only the incarcerated person’ (p.25); this book illustrates that this view fails to fully grasp the implications and consequences of the use of imprisonment. One of the aspects of the book that is especially refreshing is that it avoids the tendency of much prisons literature to neutrally title a monograph as a book on prisons but then only focus on white men's experiences. This tendency (of which I myself have been guilty) ignores the significance of Dorothy E. Smith's (and other scholars’) ideas about standpoints and institutional ethnography and the implicit expectation that the experience of white men in any given institutional setting is the ‘norm’ against which other standards are upheld. Price's book, however, includes numerous examples and narratives from the lives of black women that provide a depth of insight into the human experience of imprisonment that is rarely achieved in prison writings. It is, therefore, a useful and most welcome addition to both prisons and abolitionist scholarship that speaks not just to the problems of imprisonment in the United States but to the use of this harmful and violent state practice more widely.

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