A Wall is Just a Wall

A Wall is Just a Wall: The Permeability of the Prison in the Twentieth-Century United States. Reiko Hillyer. Duke University Press, 2024. The author describes how, until the middle of the 20th Century, even the harshest prisons in the U.S. were quite porous: allowing compassionate leave, work-release, conjugal visits, and a much higher rate of clemency. Most of this has been reversed, Hillyer reports in detail, arguing that the shift arose in parallel with Civil Rights legislation.

“By tracking the ‘thickening’ of prison walls, Hillyer historicizes changing ideas of risk, the growing bipartisan acceptance of permanent exile and fixing the convicted at the moment of their crime as a form of punishment, and prisoners’ efforts to resist.” — from the publisher.

from cover art: Jesse Krimes, Apokaluptein:1638906:II, Eastern State Penitentiary, 2015

Image description: selection from book cover shows two skylights providing weak illumination of a prison cell with walls filled with painted images.

Try your local library or visit my bookshop for A Wall Is Just a Wall.

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In This Place

In This Place Called Prison: Women’s Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment. Rachel Ellis University of California Press, 2023.

First-person account of the author’s ethnographic work with substantial reports and quotations from women incarcerated in, and experiencing re-entry after, “Mapleside Prison,” a pseudonym used to protect confidentiality. Demography of this prison population resulted in a focus almost exclusively on Christian experiences. In addition, the book explores the Protestant religious history of the U.S. prison system and its purpose.

“Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women’s prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis shows how women draw on religion to navigate lived experiences of carceral control. A trenchant study of religion colliding and colluding with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and constraint, this book speaks to the quest for dignity and light against the backdrop of mass incarceration, state surveillance, and American inequality.” — from publisher

Image description: background image shows barbed wire breaking and the barbs becoming bird-like and taking flight.

Try your local library or visit my bookshop for In This Place Called Prison

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List just beginning — and, as always, suggestions welcome.