Skyscraper Jails - by Zhandarka Kurti & Jarrod Shanahan

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

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 America's 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.