Pictured, is Josh Price.
For Josh Price, the path to publication started in the Broome County Jail. Price, a SUNY Binghamton professor, recently released Prison and Social Death, a book about the social harms of incarceration. The work that led to his most recent publication began back in 2004, when he responded to an ad in the newspaper. The local branch of the NAACP wanted help looking into a mass of letters they’d been receiving from Broome County Jail inmates. Intrigued, Price attended the next meeting.
“I went in part out of interest,” he said, “and in part because I thought this would be a way of getting involved in the community.” His academic background – and the subject of his first book – was in studying violence against women, so he’d picked up interviewing techniques that he thought might be of use in talking with inmates and investigating the claims. Thus, that same year he began collaborating with the NAACP and by the following year he’d gotten his students involved.
The cover of Josh Price’s release, Prison and Social Death.
He diligently investigated the claims – many of which were about sub-standard medical care – but said that overall, the changes that work produced were limited. He said, “In some individual cases, if something really egregious seemed to be going – if we met with the person a lot and the NAACP wrote a letter of concern – in some cases there was individual improvement of care.” Sometimes, though that improvement in care was accompanied by retribution from authorities.
Even today – in the aftermath of an investigation and fines levied by the New York State Office of the Attorney General against the private healthcare provider used in the Broome jail – Price said, “My sober assessment is … the healthcare is still really egregious there and there’s a lack of accountability.”
Ultimately, Price’s book grew out of those collaborative efforts, however limited their success was. He said, “The book in some sense tries to make sense of all those things that I was learning and to see what’s happening in the jail in a systematic way.”
As the interviewing wound down, Price got involved in other aspects of criminal justice reform. At the urging of two formerly incarcerated students, Price shifted his gaze to issues surrounding reentry and parole. Again, he says that he didn’t effect much change, but he learned a lot along the way.
After all that time interviewing and advocating for current and former inmates, Price came to a number of realizations.
“If you go to prison, institutional violence seems to be part of prison, along with systematic humiliation and natal alienation and together I argue that those amount to social death,” he said. Institutional violence, he explained, does not always mean literal violence, but can include a wider set of harsh limitations and conditions created by the prison system – such as substandard medical care. Humiliation, he found, seemed inherent to the correctional system. Those factors are combined with natal alienation – separation from one’s family – and thus, he said, “I argue in the book that being sent to prison means social death.”
Prison and Social Death was released by Rutgers University Press in July and Price said there’s a book launch party planned for the Book Vault in Endicott this fall, at a date yet to be decided. Also, on Sept. 17 he’ll be reading at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca at 5 p.m.
