Life beside Bars

“Heath Pearson’s ethnographic voice is tightly attuned to the politics of living, as he deliberately rejects and excises styles and conventions of liberal humanism as a force in tight collusion with capitalism. This is a major accomplishment in and of itself, while his theorization of prisons is powerful. The wild array of stories from characters of all kinds in this carefully crafted book makes a significant point; I learned something of how people live. The effect of this book is visceral.” - Kathleen Stewart, coauthor of The Hundreds

"Life beside Bars feels like a kind of dramatic poetry in which obscure sociality is not portrayed but enacted. Heath Pearson listens with fervent sophistication. He treats the people who work in a prison town with the kind of intellectual care that must accompany the deepest commitment to the liberation of the imprisoned, letting us know that attunement to common life is what makes possible the most rigorous critique of its institutional violation." - Fred Moten, author of Black and Blur

"Readers meet many people impacted by the carceral system and see how prison indeed touches everything around it. Recommended. All readers." - M. M. Veeneman, Choice

"Life beside Bars unfolds as a series of brief narrative vignettes. There is theory woven throughout the text, but the heart of the book is the stories, which are told with evocative first-person prose that places you on the ground with these people. . . . [H]ighly enjoyable as well as critically significant."  - Thomas J. Millay, Critical Inquiry

"Life Beside Bars offers its own pedagogy of hope and care and building to-the-side. It is both beautiful and useful ... an accessible and rich text that would be perfect for a range of ... courses." - Cristina Jo Pérez, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

"Pearson’s work ... provides important insight in an earnest and effective way; I would recommend this book to anyone interested in mass incarceration. His writing is straight forward and compelling, and the tapestry woven by the vignettes is one of joy, hope, anger, frustration, resignation, tears and laughter." - Robert Todd Perdue, Crime Media Culture

"Pearson . . . devotes a large portion of his ethnography to highlighting . . . the spaces and forms of care and kinship that are occurring within the crosshairs of domination and resistance but which are not easily reduced to either." - Kristin Doughty, Anthropological Quarterly

"A stunning and necessary contribution to carceral ethnography. . . . Life beside Bars is a rare book—rigorous yet poetic, deeply political yet tender. In the shadow of the bars, Pearson urges us to look beside them." - Philip V. McHarris, Souls

"There is something for everyone in Life Beside Bars. For those uninitiated in the field of criminal justice, Pearson’s ethnographic account tethers the economy, politics, and education to a punitive carceral system emphasizing historic and systemic discrimination faced by racial and ethnic minorities." - Fernando Linhares, New Jersey Studies