Caroline Parker’s Carceral Citizens analyzes the relationship between labor and confinement in contemporary Puerto Rico. Across four chapters, she traces how the mostly male drug offenders comprising Puerto Rican therapeutic communities become vernacular professionals and, in more than a few cases, adherents of the very system often deemed culpable for their incarceration and precarious socioeconomic present. In so doing, these men draw from religious traditions and find meaning and belonging in their work while also exercising citizenship on the margins and perpetuating the “carceral state” itself. In Parker’s textured account, the carceral state is not a mere machine, though. She goes to great lengths to show who the cogs of the machine are and, perhaps most importantly, to understand them on their own terms.
To uncover the lesser-known facets of the carceral state, Parker adeptly employs ethnography, which she conceptualizes as “a way of showing a way of looking” (26). Her ethnographic approach throughout the book is characterized by meticulousness and intellectual humility. This is evident in her exploration of certain themes, such as social labor and belonging, which receive more in-depth treatment than others, such as sexuality. This thematic selectivity is not indicative of an omission on Parker’s part; rather, it reflects her understanding that her collaborators prioritized and likely needed to center their narratives on specific issues. As Parker argues, the complex, still-unfolding lives of system-impacted individuals deserve to be narrated without scholars posturing as omniscient witnesses who can definitively determine their past, present, and future identities. In essence, Parker models a method for conducting ethnographic research responsibly, acknowledging its inherent complexities. This serves as a crucial lesson, particularly for humanists and social scientists, acting as a powerful reminder of the insights lost when we impose our own theoretical frameworks and ethical stances on “source material.”
Another crucial facet of Carceral Citizens is the seriousness with which Parker engages with the discipline of history. She does this on multiple levels, including by situating her study within the mid-twentieth-century trajectory of the field of anthropology itself. However, further elaboration on how physical and early cultural anthropology influenced early-twentieth-century understandings of race and nation in Puerto Rico would have enriched this disciplinary self-reflection.
The most salient historical throughline in Carceral Citizens is Parker’s examination of contemporary carceral labor and its links to broader histories of citizenship and labor. While her conceptualization of past carceral labor is compelling, it appears to gravitate primarily toward racialized enslavement and coerced “free” labor. A more comprehensive analysis might have benefited from a deeper engagement with the history of Puerto Rico as a Spanish penal colony, where for centuries, the labor of slaves, convicts, and exiles was central to massive infrastructure projects. While Parker effectively demonstrates how Puerto Rico’s carceral labor milieu has transformed under US rule to sustain state infrastructure, a comparative analysis integrating the longue durée global history of penal colonies and convict labor could have yielded further insights. Such an approach would enable a deeper examination of coercive migratory labor systems, their inherent limits, and the shifting notions of exclusion and belonging across colonial–imperial, national, linguistic, and diasporic boundaries.
Similarly, a deeper contextualization of the flourishing of carceral labor therapy under colonial populism in the mid-twentieth century (the era of the Partido Popular Democrático) would have clarified where the subsequent “creating new men” variant of labor therapy (80) and the current penchant for rehabilitation in Puerto Rican therapeutic communities come from in the first place.
Overall, Carceral Citizens is an intellectually generative and significant work that effectively argues for a more complete understanding of the afterlives of incarceration in colonial times and beyond. Parker’s original theoretical framework demonstrates that carcerality is neither a monolithic nor a static phenomenon. Instead, carcerality is presented as an evolving organism that has spawned diverse labor models and social formations, some of which challenge conventional understandings of its modern expressions. Scholars and students of anthropology, history, Latin American Studies, carceral studies, and even labor and religious studies who sit with Parker’s landmark text are in for a treat.
