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

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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.
jails, a network of skyscraper facilities amounting to the largest carceral construction the city has seen in decades.
How did this happen
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.

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.

Reviews

Praise for Captives

Shanahan, who personally experienced Rikers' violence, has crafted a masterpiece of synthesized social observation, analytic history and political critique. Now that the city has a new mayor who loudly champions the jailers and bad cops, Captives is urgent and obligatory reading.
Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums

Captives is more than a history of the notorious Rikers Island; it is a riveting, caged bird's eye view of the tumultuous shift from postwar liberal dreams of penal reform to neoliberal punishment, police power, and the rise of the carceral state. Ultimately, it is a book about class struggle - how we got from build better to lock 'em up to shut it down.
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

Captives is an important and timely book that vividly depicts how decades of class struggle and oppression, especially along the lines of race and gender, shaped the rise of Rikers Island as we know it today. A must read!
Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch

Shanahans lively must-read explains the power politics shaping New York City's municipal lockup frenzy.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography and Golden Gulag

Captives is a long, hard look at the role of human cages within New York City politics and the reform efforts that birthed Rikers. His account reads like a page out of L.A. Confidential rewritten with corrupt guards in place of cops, from an unaccounted $2 million discovered posthumously in the safe of the guards' union president to rebel prisoners at the Manhattan Tombs hanging burning sheets out of windows.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Shanahan makes it possible to answer the immediate and pressing question-why did an agenda of jail reform fail so drastically, producing in the process one of the most notorious penal colonies in the United States
The Nation

A scrupulously researched history showing nearly a century of dysfunction of one of the world's largest correctional institutions. And the inescapable conclusion that, whatever the justice is in shipping people to Rikers, there is little justice once they arrive.
New York Daily News

A vivid, vital, and terrifying volume
Jacobin

Author Bio

Zhandarka Kurtiis an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Loyola University Chicago. Her work examines race, class, criminalization and punishment through a historical and contemporary perspective. She is the co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform and the Future of Americas Punishment System and editor of Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.
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.