Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America

2019, University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-1517906887

From broken-window policing in Detroit to prison-building in Appalachia, exploring the expansion of the carceral state and its oppressive social relations into everyday life.

Prison Land offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations—including property, work, gender, and race—enacted across various landscapes of American life. Prisons, Brett Story shows, are more than just buildings of incarceration bound to cycles of crime and punishment. Instead, she investigates the production of carceral power at a range of sites, from buses to coalfields and from blighted cities to urban financial hubs, to demonstrate how the organization of carceral space is ideologically and materially grounded in racial capitalism. Story’s critically acclaimed film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is based on the same research that informs this book. In both, Story takes an expansive view of what constitutes contemporary carceral space, interrogating the ways in which racial capitalism is reproduced and for which police technologies of containment and control are employed. By framing the prison as a set of social relations, Prison Land forces us to confront the production of new carceral forms that go well beyond the prison system. In doing so, it profoundly undermines both conventional ideas of prisons as logical responses to the problem of crime and attachment to punishment as the relevant measure of a transformed criminal justice system.

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• Story, B. (Forthcoming 2020). “Fire Camp, Highway, Coal Mine: Geographies of the Carceral Quotidian,” in Paths to the Prison: Histories on the Architecture of Carcerality. Ed. Isabelle C. Kirkham-Lewitt. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City: New York.
• Story, B. (2019). “My First Film Teacher Was a City”. Talkhouse. November 13.
• Story, B. and Schept, J. (2019). “Against Punishment,” Social Justice vol.45, No.4.
• Story, B., Cowen, D., Paradis, E., and Mitchell, A. (Forthcoming in 2020), Digital Life in the Global Suburbs. University of British Columbia Press.
• Story, B., and Prins, S. (2019). “A Green New Deal for Decarceration,” Jacobin. August.
• Story, B., Rangen, P., and Sarlin, P. (2018). “Humanitarian Ethics and Documentary Practice.” Camera Obscura. 
• Story, B., et. al. (2018). “Forum: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes.” Social Justice vol.44, No.2/3.
• Story, B. (2018). Interviewed by Scott MacDonald. Filmmaker Magazine. June.
• Story, B. (2017). “Against a Humanizing Prison Cinema: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and the Politics of Abolition Imagery,” in The Visual Criminology Handbook. Eds. M. Brown and E. Carrabine. Routledge: London.
• Story, B, M. Brown and E. Carrabine. “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes: An interview with film producer and director Brett Story.” Crime, Media, Culture, Vol 13, Issue 1, pp. 107 – 113. September 26, 2016. [not publicly accessible] 
• Story, Brett. (2016). Five Book Plan: Carceral Geography. Verso. November 3.  
• Story, B. (2015). “The Prison and the City: Tracking the Neoliberal Life of the ‘Million Dollar Block.’” Theoretical Criminology. 1-20. 
• Story, B. (2015). “Making Sense of Solitary Confinement: Spatial Anti-Sociality as Preemptive CounterResistance,” in Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past. Eds. K. Morin and D. Moran. Routledge: London.
• Story, B. (2014). “Alone Inside: Solitary Confinement and the Ontology of the Individual in Modern Life.” Geographica Helvetica 69 (Special Edition Social Geography): 355-364.
• Story, B. (2014). “Review of Le Joli Mai.” Antipode.
• Story, B. (2013). “Alone Inside.” Radio documentary about solitary confinement for CBC’s Ideas. Writer and Producer. Broadcast date: September 03, 2013.
• Story, B. (2013). “In/different cities: A case for contact at the margins.” Social and Cultural Geography 14 (7): 4. 752-761.
• Cowen, D. and Story, B. (2013). “Intimacy and the Everyday,” in The Ashgate Companion to Critical Geopolitics. Eds. K. Dodds, M. Kuus, and J. Sharp. Surrey: Ashgate. 341-358. [authorship split evenly].
• Story, B. (2012). “On Waste as the Political Other of Value.” Garage Sale Standard. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
• Story, B. (2012). “Review of The Forgotten Space.” Antipode. 44 (4): 1575-1578.
• Story, B. (2012). “Occupying Prisons: Canada and the Future of Incarceration” (film review). Toronto Review of Books. June 20.
• Story, B. (2011). “You Ask Me Whether I Approve of Violence?” The Toronto Review of Books. September.
• Story, B. (2008). “Bugliosi v. Bush,” The Nation Magazine, June.
• Story, B. (2008). “The People vs. Michael Chertoff,” The Nation Magazine, March. Story, B. (2006). “With the Comrades in Caracas,” Montreal Mirror, February.
• Story, B. (2005). Politics as Usual: The Criminalization of Unauthorized Migrants in the United States. Published Master’s Thesis. September 2005.

• Rico, Gabriela. (2019) SXSW 2019 Women Directors: Meet Brett Story – “The Hottest August”. Woman & Hollywood. March 15.
• Rapold, Nicolas. (2019) Interview: Brett Story. Film Comment. March 11.
• Rizov, Vadim. (2019) “I’m Really Interested in Expanding What We Call ‘Political Cinema’”: Brett Story on The Hottest August. Filmmaker Magazine. March 8.
• MacDonald, Scott. (2018). The Landscape of Futurelessness: An Interview with Brett Story. Film Quarterly Vol. 72 No. 1, Fall 2018. 50-57. [not publicly accessible] 
• Elmi, Rooney. (2018). Centering the Margins: a interview with Brett Story on her debut documentary, THE PRISON IN 12 LANDSCAPES. Svllywood. May 10. 
• Phillips, Craig. (2017). Canadian Filmmaker Explores American Prison System’s Long Reach. PBS. May 5.
• Denvir, Daniel. (2017). Mass incarceration is everywhere [podcast]. The Dig. April 18.
• W. Myers, George. (2017). Director Brett Story in conversation. Medium. February 6th.
• Reardon, Kiva. (2016). The Prison in Twelve Landscapes: An Interview with Brett Story. Toronto Film Critics. November 21.
• Cooper, Julia. (2016). We Talked To Filmmaker Brett Story About The Broken Prison System. Vice. June 29.
• Alli, Sabrina. (2016). Brett Story: The Prison in 12 Landscapes. Guernica. April 15.
• Taylor, Astra. (2016). Prisons without Crime: Brett Story on Her Genre-Subverting Doc on Mass Incarceration, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes. Filmmaker Magazine. April 14.