Fourth City

This volume is the first to assemble the voices of that singular metropolis in a manner that serves as a testament to the lives lived by unprecedented numbers of people in cages. Practical, poetic, wise, informed, wounded, alive, in tones of despair and hard-earned hope, they illuminate the arc of everyday life in the world’s largest carceral regime with laser precision . . . This volume should be in classrooms, libraries, bookstores, prisons, and on the bookshelf of every citizen.
—Michelle Brown, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, and Book Review Editor, Theoretical Criminology

After decades of exploding prison populations, the Fourth City reaches into every part of America. These stories of its survivors are critical for anyone who wants to understand what mass incarceration has done to this country.
—Jonathan Simon, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley

Behind bars there is an alternative social order, and that twisted order has everlasting psychological effects on the person that has to endure/survive a segregated community with little or no rehabilitation. Larson has collected a mosaic of language that helps to explicate the failures and misconceptions of the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States. If it is true that one can always tell the state of a nation by the literature it produces, then the reader of Fourth City most certainly will come to understand what really goes on behind the circular razor wire.
—Randall Horton, poet and author of The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street and Roxbury

This book offers an inside perspective that is unparalleled in its contribution to our understanding of imprisonment. The organization makes sense and offers a valuable framework for this comprehensive treatment.
—Austin D. Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Director of the Mellon Project on Student-Faculty Research, Amherst College

Doran Larson and his team of researchers have compiled the largest collection of contemporary American prison narratives ever recorded. The incarcerated speak for themselves, but their numbers are telling in a more important way. They expose a nation that incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country in the world and in conditions that no human being should have to endure. Fourth City gives us an enormous city from hell hidden in our midst and asks, what are we willing to do about it?
—Robert A. Ferguson, George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature, and Criticism, Columbia University