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.

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.

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