A Review of Heath Pearson, Life beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024, XII+225 pp.

Abstract

The book by American anthropologist Heath Pearson, Life beside Bars, aims to show how the prison system permeates and shapes the social fabric of a local community. The dissertation study on which the book is based relies on several years of ethnographic observation and interviews with residents of Bridgeton in southern New Jersey, USA. The city and its surrounding area have several penal institutions, which play an important role in the local economy. Pearson attempts to show in his book how some residents reproduce police violence and the dominance of the prison complex, others resist it, and some others live “on the side”, which forms the structure of the book. Despite such an ambitious task and interesting empirical material, Pearson’s study suffers from several problems that make the book predictable and therefore useless for scholarly consideration: methodological simplifications, ideological bias, and a lack of analytical rigour. This review offers a critical analysis of the book as an example of how a strong political message can crowd out anthropological analysis.