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Joshua M Price, Prison and Social Death

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/1462474516688281
Published date01 October 2018
Date01 October 2018
Subject MatterBook reviews
untitled Book reviews
525
welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care
of me, I was in prison and you visited me’’ (Matthew 25:35-36, New Revised
Standard Version).
These words form the foundation of the Christian practice known as the
Corporal Works of Mercy. These acts, taken on behalf of the downtrodden and
forgotten are considered essential transformations of faith into actions. Stevenson’s
memoir suggests to us that these acts of mercy cannot be dismissed as mere reli-
gious devotion. Rather, in showing mercy to the imprisoned and forgotten, we
remember that at the center of the vital debates about punishment and criminal
justice reform sit fellow humans waiting for us to show them mercy.
Peter Hanink
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Joshua M Price, Prison and Social Death, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2015;
193 pp. 193 (including index): 978-0-8135-6557-6, $54 (cloth), $26 (pbk)
Joshua M Price’s Prison and Social Death is an important contribution to prison
abolition’s vision of a radically dif‌ferent future. The book begins with an epi-
graph from Raymond Santana, who spent f‌ive years in prison before the exon-
eration of the Central Park Five: ‘‘I didn’t realize the social death that we were
given at the sentence. This wasn’t a f‌ive to f‌ifteen or f‌ive to ten; this was a life
sentence, a death sentence, in a sense.’’1 When I f‌irst read this book, it felt
important and even critical that Price’s work began by echoing the analysis of
social death that comes from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.
When I re-read the book after the election of Donald Trump, its opening passage
made all too clear the stakes of the current political moment. I was reminded, in
the opening reference to the Central Park Five, of Trump’s full-page advertise-
ments in New York newspapers in 1989, which called for reinstating the death
penalty for the f‌ive Black and Latino youth arrested in the case, and of how he
continued, during the 2016...

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