Captives

How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage

Jarrod Shanahan

$39.99

Hardback

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English

Verso Books
17 May 2022

Memoirs; Police & security services; Penology & punishment

Captives combines a thrilling narrative account of Rikers Island’s descent into infamy with a dramatic retelling of the last seventy years of New York and American politics from the vantage point of its jails. It is a story of a crowded field of contending powers–city bureaucrats and unions, black power activists and correction offices, crooked cops and elected leaders–

struggle for the right to run our cities, a story that culminates in the triumph of of the twin figures we today call neoliberalism and mass incarceration. It is the history of how the Rikers Island of today–and the social order it represents–came to be.

With a sweeping vision and an often cinematic touch, Captives records how the tempo of history was set by the metronome of bloody and bruising clashes between corrections officers and prisoners, and between police officers and virtually everyone else. Written by a one-time inmate, Captives draws on extensive archival research, decades of journalism, interviews, prisoner testimonials, and firsthand experience to deliver an urgent intervention into our nationwide conversation about the future of mass incarceration.

By: Jarrod Shanahan
Imprint: Verso Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 34mm
Weight: 637g
ISBN: 9781788739955
ISBN 10: 1788739957
Pages: 448
Publication Date: 17 May 2022
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jarrod Shanahan is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University. Jarrod is the author of dozens of articles, short stories, and zines, and is a former inmate at the Eric M. Taylor Center at Rikers Island.

Reviews for Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage

Rikers Island has the same relationship to New York as his picture did to Dorian Gray in the famous story by Oscar Wilde: the notorious super-jail is the grotesque face of the institutional cruelty and racism that lies behind so much of the Big Apple's preening dazzle. 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