Prison Town

<p>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.</p><p>In <em>Prison Town</em> 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. </p><p></p><p><strong>Andrea R. Morrell</strong> is an associate professor of anthropology at Guttman Community College City University of New York.</p><p></p>