The Jail is Everywhere
Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A VITAL COLLECTION FROM A KEY BATTLEGROUND IN THE ABOLITION STRUGGLE: THE COUNTY JAIL
Nearly every county and major city in the United States has a jail, the short-term detention center controlled by local sheriffs that funnels people into prisons and long-term incarceration. While the growing movement against incarceration and policing has called to reform or abolish prisons, jails have often gone unnoticed, or in some cases seen as a "better" alternative to prisons."
Yet jails, in recent decades, have been the fastest-growing sector of the US carceral state. Jails are widely used for immigrant detention by ICE and the U.S. Marshals and as a place to offload people that prisons can't hold. As jails grow, they transform the region around them, and whole towns and small cities see health care, mental health care, substance abuse, and employment opportunities taken over by carceral concerns.
If jails are everywhere, resistance to jails is too. The recent jail boom has sparked a wealth of local activist struggles to resist and close jails all across the United States, from rural counties to major cities.
The Jail Is Everywhere brings these disparate voices together, with contributions from activists, scholars, and expert journalists describing the effects of this quiet jail boom, mapping the growth of the carceral state, and sharing strategies from recent fights against jail construction to strengthen struggles against jailing everywhere.
With a foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Norton, Pelot-Hobbs (Carceral Crisis), and Schept (Coal, Cages, Crisis)—professors of criminal justice at Governors State University, University of Kentucky, and Eastern Kentucky University, respectively—bring together informative essays and interviews focused on local organizing around decarceration, or the reduction of jailed populations. Mostly county-level facilities, jails typically house a large percentage of pretrial detainees and increasingly are used for immigrants and overflow from federal and state prisons. In 2019, jails held an estimated 758,000 people at the midyear point, with "more than 10 million people" cycling through them over the course of a year. The essays and interviews document antijail activism in, among other places, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Sacramento, Calif., and highlight organizers' strategies and tactics, including pushing for the replacement of local jails with mental health facilities and diversion programs, attempting to abolish bail systems, and putting a stop to the jailing of people unable to pay fees or fines. Though the editors are mainly concerned with providing actionable "knowledge and experience from jail fights across the country," the book also paints a vivid picture of a grassroots, nationwide decarceral movement. Activists involved on the ground will find this valuable, while others will receive a substantial education in the politics and economics of incarceration.
