Over the last decade, many works on punishment have examined the complicated correctional implications of the 2008 recession. While a few works have been optimistic about curbing the American appetite for punishment, most have expressed doubts about the reach and profundity of “justice reinvestment” schemes. Brett Story's Prison Land belongs to the latter group, and accordingly she characterizes postrecession criminal-justice reform as a thinly veiled, cynical repackaging of the neoliberal logic that preserves incarceration. This heavily theorized neo-Marxist narrative, which reflects Story's abolitionist politics, is well-trodden territory for punishment-and-society scholars. What makes Story's work unique and interesting, though, is its critical-geography perspective, which emphasizes the spatial dimension of the carceral state – literally an examination of the carceral landscape.

Story illuminates the omnipresence of the carceral state far beyond institutions and locales that appear carceral to the naked eye. Each chapter depicts a seemingly noncarceral setting – gentrifying downtown Detroit; neighborhood politics in Brooklyn; Appalachian mined mountaintops as potential correctional settings; statewide overnight buses; spatial restrictions on sex offenders, gang members, and electronically monitored homes. For each setting, Story's spatial perspective is enhanced with sensitive interviews, maps, and a sophisticated analysis of political economy, emphasizing that the carceral state is everywhere when examined through the proper lens. This understanding is crucial, because much of the recession-era rhetoric about criminal-justice reform focussed on shifts away from incarceration. As Story convincingly demonstrates, an ostensibly benevolent push for urban renewal through a tech tycoon's purchase of downtown buildings also marginalizes and segregates poor people of color; an apparently well-meant effort at neighborhood justice as an alternative to incarceration serves more as a public-relations stunt for law enforcement than as a real solution to the problems that drive and cause crime; and efforts to create jobs in a vanishing world of coal mining hide an underbelly of prison-capacity enhancement.

It is especially valuable to read the book as a companion to Story's lauded documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), which depicts the carceral state without showing a single prison. Here, a master chess player who learned to play in prison teaches chess in Central Park; an Appalachian town's librarian discusses the impact of a prison escape on the town; California prisoners fight fires without any post-release job prospects as firefighters; and warehouses in the Bronx are chockful with goods for prisons.

Another important takeaway is Story's sophisticated sense of what a “place” is. The book truly shines in its unflinching description of the “prison in-between”: the overnight buses that take visitors to remote, rural prisons. Here, the physical discomfort, expense, and time of the travelers–visitors are sacrifices that extend the realm of the carceral to the bus visit, and the neoliberal hand of the market, through the companies who run the buses, is hardly invisible (the opening scene of Story's documentary powerfully shows this overnight journey while the audio track features loving messages from the visitors to their incarcerated relatives). This chapter, as well as the one examining urban residence restrictions, is a welcome update to Foucault's ideas about the “archipelago of punishment”: the carceral state is not merely islands in the sea, but rather the entire landscape, the seen and the unseen, the physically designated, the commercially managed, and the legally prescribed. Even the home, where electronic monitoring creates a new and restrictive relationship with one's utmost private space, is part of the carceral landscape.

Another laudable aspect of the book is how it pushes beyond the mainstream discourse about the “prison–industrial complex.” The left's “favorite bogeyman” of private prisons is critiqued as poor and limiting; Story's narrative clearly demonstrates that the public/private divide is irrelevant to the experience of the carceral, and that neoliberal principles encompass the state as well as private providers.

Some readers – particularly those not fully on board the abolitionist train – might not appreciate the heavy theoretical slant of the book; some of its arguments (such as its critique that neighborhood justice programs do not get at the root of poverty) evince some naivety about what can and cannot be expected from well-meaning actors, and some parts of it fail to take the actors on their own terms. But the powerful spatial interrogation enriches our perception of the carceral, showing us an important story of exclusion and “giving up” on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in which punitivism merely plays a small part. Reading the book in tandem with Story's phenomenal documentary will provide a particularly rich spatial experience, after which your view of the postrecession urban and rural landscape will never be the same.