Skyscraper Jails

"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 Rodríguez, 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

Praise for Captives by Jarrod Shanahan

“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

“Shanahan’s 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