Book Roundtable: Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York by Andrea Morrell (Hybrid)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In this session, sponsored by the Critical Prison Studies Caucus, a panel of interlocutors will discuss Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York by Andrea Morrell. Prison Town is a groundbreaking ethnography that examines the workings of racial capitalism in an Upstate prison town with careful attention to processes of racialization, fascist political formation through guard labor, and organized abandonment across rural and urban geographies. An abolitionist ethnography, Prison Town builds on the analyses developed in books such as Golden Gulag, Coal, Cages, Crisis, and Tip of the Spear, as well as organizations including Critical Resistance, Release Aging People in Prison, and the Prison Moratorium Project, in order to develop analyses that contribute to movements to close prisons, free incarcerated people, and build life-affirming institutions that meet the needs of our communities. Morrell will be joined in this session by Naomi Murakawa, Jack Norton, David Roediger, and Damien M. Sojoyner.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Jack Norton, Governors State University

Panelists

• Naomi Murakawa, Princeton University

• Jack Norton, Governors State University

• David Roediger, University of Kansas

Virtual Accommodation Panelist

• Damien Sojoyner, University of California, Irvine

Comment

• Andrea Morrell, CUNY Guttman Community College

Biographical Information

Andrea Morrell is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Guttman Community College CUNY where she teaches classes in the first year experience and the Urban Studies program. Her abolitionist ethnography, Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, NY will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in June 2025. She is working on a new project about Irish American identity and whiteness in the NYPD.

Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and editor of the Abolitionist Papers book series at Haymarket Books.

Jack Norton is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University in the Chicago Southland. He is a co-editor of the book The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso, 2024).

David Roediger teaches American Studies at University of Kansas and writes on race and class in the United States. Educated through college at public schools in Illinois, he completed doctoral work at Northwestern University. His recent books include Class, Race, and Marxism, Seizing Freedom, An Ordinary White, and (with Elizabeth Esch) The Production of Difference. His older writings on race, immigration, and working-class history include The Wages of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness. Professor Roediger's work focuses on race and class in the U.S. and the Atlantic world. His current project is a history off 400 years of portrayals of Friday, sometimes as Black and sometimes as Indigenous, in the novel Robinson Crusoe.

Damien M. Sojoyner is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He researches the relationship among the public education system, prisons, and the construction of Black masculinity in Southern California. He is the author of three books: First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles, Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums, and Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice.