New Books Network Heath Pearson, "Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town" (Duke UP, 2024)
Nov 18, 2025
Heath Pearson, an Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Georgetown University, explores the intricate relationship between community life and incarceration in Cumberland County, New Jersey. He shares his journey into this research, emphasizing the importance of everyday joy amid confinement. Engaging stories reveal how people resist and build lives alongside prisons. Pearson also addresses the historical context of confinement and imagines alternative futures through creativity and mutual aid, hoping to inspire beauty and solidarity.
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Chance Lunch Led To Fieldsite
- Heath Pearson landed in Cumberland County after a chance train conversation led to a lunch invitation from a local who said their town had five prisons. He chose to stay and pursue ethnography there because the place felt like the right fieldsite.
Beside‑ness As Analytic Frame
- The title Life Beside Bars captures the book's focus on spatial 'beside-ness' rather than traditional binaries of resistance versus domination. That framing unlocked the manuscript's introduction and analytic shape.
Center Everyday Knowledge
- Pearson argues scholarly literature often ignores the everyday knowledge of people most affected by policing and prisons. He centers everyday life to broaden theory and reveal unseen forms of understanding and resistance.
