Full Description
What kind of experience is incarceration? How should one define its constraints? The author, who conducted extensive fieldwork in a maximum-security jail in Papua New Guinea, seeks to address these questions through a vivid and sympathetic account of inmates' lives.
Prison Studies is a growing field of interest for social scientists. As one of the first ethnographic studies of a prison outside western societies and Japan, this book contributes to a reinterpretation of the field's scope and assumptions. It challenges notions of what is punitive about imprisonment by exploring the creative as well as negative outcomes of detention, separation and loss. Instead of just coping, the prisoners in Papua New Guinea's Last Place find themselves drawing fresh critiques and new approaches to contemporary living.
Contents
List of figures and tables
Acknowledgements
Prologue
The last place
Under constraint
Forgetting
Sneeze
Chapter 1. Dark Place
Out of sight
Supervision
'Quasi-ethnography'
Chapter 2. Bus Stop
'Jailbird'
Cowboy
Raskal
Bus stop
Chapter 3. Jeffrey's Flight
Waiting
Dreaming
Emergency
Chapter 4. Place of Men
Men's house
Body of men/family of women
Resistance?
Chapter 5. Place of God
Conversion
Haven
Light
Chapter 6. Following White Men
New
Loose bodies
Friends
Mixmates
Critique
Counter-critique
Conclusion
Homesickness
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
