Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Heath Pearson. Life beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2024. 240 pp.

Review by Thomas J. Millay

1 May 2025

Life beside Bars is an engagingly written ethnography of Cumberland County, South Jersey. Cumberland County is home to “five correctional facilities”: “three state prisons,” “one federal prison,” and a “regional jail,” which “have been squeezed into a twenty-mile radius” (p. 2). The specific focus of Life beside Bars is how the carceral system has shaped life in proximity to these massive institutions.

These opening statistics may give the impression of bland sociological detachment, but Life beside Bars is not a dry academic study. The text is filled to the brim with life that pulses through its pages chiefly because of the form in which the book is written. Life beside Bars unfolds as a series of brief narrative vignettes. There is theory woven throughout the text, but the heart of the book is the stories, which are told with evocative first-person prose that places you on the ground with these people.

We find ourselves: in the basement of a public library in Cumberland County, looking at Lenape artifacts alongside a successful, local white businessman called Old Man Tilley; with a friendly housing authority employee named Jon; at a table in an Amish market eating with local Black female attorneys; among nonprofit directors, pastors, bakery owners, police chiefs, and formerly incarcerated persons. Such different spaces and people, each with their distinct vantage point, coordinate in Pearson’s ad hoc synthesis to create a kind of cognitive-cultural map of Cumberland County, one that does not dissect the carceral system itself but its impact upon the inextricably interwoven social world surrounding it. The creation of such a map is a serious scholarly ambition; the fact that this ambition is realized via short biographies that are fun to read makes Life beside Bars highly enjoyable as well as critically significant.

Yet these vignettes do not exhaust what one finds in Life beside Bars. There is explicit theorization happening throughout, and Pearson’s commentary has strengths and weaknesses. Life beside Bars is at its best when it is upholding spaces and persons which would otherwise be overlooked and forgotten; it is at its weakest when castigating viewpoints other than the author’s.

The most censorious words are reserved for the “Sheepdogs,” a loose assemblage of mainly white men who gather for the purpose of martial encouragement in the face of perceived threats from outsiders. Certainly this is a group that deserves to receive a thoroughgoing critique; that is not in question. What is lacking is a deeper analysis of the group’s motivations. For example, I wonder if the following tripartite analysis might help us grapple with a group like the Sheepdogs. This is a group that has been encouraged by its social world to: (1) have safe, comfortable jobs; (2) live in safe, comfortable neighborhoods; while, at the same time, (3) its social world teaches that in order to be a man one must be ready to engage in violence—teaching, in other words, that masculinity has to do with aggression framed as protection of the innocent (“sheep”). The “Sheepdog” meeting thus serves to address a felt contradiction. However, presumably this contradiction could be resolved in other ways if alternate options were provided, such as labor that required traditionally masculine physical exertion, housing that resulted in daily interchange between different classes and ethnicities, or convincing redefinitions of masculinity itself. As both Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson contend, all analysis should proceed with the conviction that every desire of every person can be rechanneled and redeemed.

The gem of the book is Pearson’s writings on a clothing store called The Spot, located in a downtown area of Cumberland County. Focusing on this physical space and on the persons who inhabit it allows Pearson to weave his theoretical interests together and give them embodied example. The Spot is a third-space location, neither supportive of the carceral system nor formed in explicit opposition to it. It is a “to-the-side” space, a space free from “the dialectic of domination—resistance” (p. 10). In to-the-side space, a different kind of life happens: interdependent life, where our need of one another is acknowledged, where our resources are shared (“from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”), where my flourishing and your flourishing are tied together.

From an outsider’s perspective, The Spot might just look like a group of people talking, cutting up, laughing, eating together. And it is that. But there is more going on here, and it is Pearson’s particular skill as an ethnographer to draw out this “more.” The stakes of what is being accomplished are larger than one realizes. In fact, what is happening at The Spot is an embodiment of what Pearson (following Cedric Robinson) calls “‘the socialist impulse’” (p. 6). In an age where the phrase actually existing socialism usually refers to something in the past, Pearson shows us that this linguistic-referential convention exists because we have been looking in the wrong place.

In 2020, uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s murder swept the United States and even inspired demonstrations in other countries as well. Looking out over the social landscape now, almost five years later, such protests are not completely gone but they are not what they once were. What should be done? Life beside Bars provides one answer: Pay attention to forms of freedom when they unexpectedly (and perhaps temporarily) burst forth. Celebrate and join. In whatever small way you can, make utopia happen now.