A webinar with Kristin Doughty, Assoc. Professor of Anthropology and
Joshua Dubler, Assoc. Professor of Religion, both at the University of Rochester

When you live in a country that cages two million people, the widespread feeling that prisons exist someplace “over there” is half social engineering and half illusion. For generations, prisons have been sited out in the country, and people are shuttled across the state to fill them. But the prison’s reach may be felt all around us: in missing family and friends; in those loved ones returning home changed, in the public and private interests that comprise what Angela Davis called “the prison industrial complex;” in the “crime” around which so much of our politics is predatorily oriented; and in the shriveled notion of “justice” that for most Americans marks that concept’s limits of possibility. What effect does mass incarceration have on our communities? These scholars’ work examines how the high saturation of prisons, jails, and federal immigrant detention facilities in upstate New York shapes our region. Kristin Doughty and Joshua Dubler teach an ethnography course called “The Cultural Politics of Prison Towns.”