From the publisher:
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 Skyscraper Jails, scholars and organizers Jarrod 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.
Advance praise includes:
"In
this view of New York City politics from the street, Jarrod Shanahani
and Zhandarka Kurti cut through the double-speak of carceral humanism
that elites used to turn the Campaign to Close Rikers into a plan to
build new skyscraper jails. Real estate developers and politicians make
New York City hospitable to more jails, but so do the philanthropists,
nonprofit service providers, professors, and the architects who
celebrate modern and even 'green' jail design. But Rikers is not just a
toxic complex of buildings. Rikers is built on the toxic social
relations of capitalism. This, as Shanahan and Kurti tell us, is what we
must confront."
—Naomi Murakawa, author, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America
“Skyscraper Jails
is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to fight carceral state
expansion from a deeply rigorous, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary
standpoint. Kurti and Shanahan show how our struggles can be documented,
studied, and written about in ways that offer tangible lessons for the
future. And for abolitionists committed to bringing about the closure of
Rikers and reclaiming the city, Skyscraper Jails
is necessary reading on the specific liberal contexts and organizations
from which the borough based jails plan emerged and which continue to
have profound impacts on policing, incarceration, and social control in
New York City.”
—Mon Mohapatra, organizer with Community Justice Exchange and No New Jails NYC
“I have fought against jails in my community for years and I have lived this history. Skyscraper Jails
has the audacity to expose the truth about nonprofits and how they have
sabotaged our work as revolutionary abolitionist organizers. This book
is a must read for anyone who wants to be involved in the hard work of
breaking down prison walls and fighting to build another world.”
—Lisa Ortega, organizer with Community in Unity and Take Back the Bronx
"I urge you to embrace the insurrectionist anti-liberalism so generously unfurled in Skyscraper Jails.
Blending grounded analysis, critical storytelling, and historical
study, Shanahan and Kurti identify the emergence of a ‘progressive’ 21st
century counterinsurgency regime in New York City and beyond. These
pages demystify the coalescence of philanthropic, nonprofit, academic,
and Democratic Party actors and social media influencers who have
weaponized the terms of ‘social justice’ and ‘abolition’ to advance
reformist expansions of carceral warfare. Skyscraper Jails is
an indispensable tool for identifying new-and-old enemies of serious
liberationist praxis—a painful though necessary task in this moment of
proliferating cooptation, opportunism, and confusion."
—Dylan RodrÃguez, Critical Resistance founding collective and Distinguished Professor, University of California
"Jails are instruments of crisis management, class containment,
and counterinsurgency. In their examination of New York City as a
laboratory for neoliberal governance and innovations of carceral
violence, Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti interrogate the alliance
of philanthropic, non-profit, and governmental forces attempting to
rescue the legitimacy of incarceration through deploying the vernacular
of social justice. At once a sober assessment of the terrain of struggle
and a searing argument that, whether decrepit island or gleaming tower,
jails are central sites of racialized class war, Skyscraper Jails lays out the urgent stakes of this central battle for an abolitionist future."
―Judah Schept, author of Coal, Cages, Crisis and Progressive Punishment