Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City - Softcover

Kurti, Zhandarka; Shanahan, Jarrod

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798888902646

Verlag: Haymarket Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A damning account of the latest transformation in mass incarceration, revealing how powerful nonprofits and so-called progressives used the language of social movements to build new jails.

In 2019, after unyielding pressure from activists, New York City seemed poised to close the detested Rikers Island penal colony. The local press dutifully reported that the end of Rikers was imminent, and New Yorkers celebrated the closure of the country’s largest urban jail, condemned as a moral stain on an otherwise great city. The problem, however, was that the city had not actually committed to closing Rikers. And at the same time, it laid the groundwork for the construction of more jails, a network of skyscraper facilities amounting to the largest carceral construction the city has seen in decades.

How did this happen?

In Skyscraper Jails, scholars and organizersJarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti detail how progressive forces in New York City appropriated the rhetoric of social movements and social justice to promise “downsized” and “humane" jails. The principal advocates of these new jails were not right-wing politicians, but prominent city activists and progressive non-profit organizations.

As the political coalition that campaigned for the new jails fans out across the United States, the story at the heart of Skyscraper Jails is at once a case study and a cautionary tale for what will be coming to cities and towns across the United States and beyond.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Zhandarka Kurti is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University, Chicago. She researches and writes about race, class, policing, incarceration, and mass supervision. She is the co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform and the Future of America’s Punishment System and editor of Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity. She lives in Chicago.

Jarrod Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage, co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America's Punishment System, and City Time: On Being Sentence to Rikers Island, forthcoming from NYU Press, and editor of Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity. He lives in Chicago and works as an assistant professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University in University Park, IL.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Haymarket Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798888902646
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar