Abstract
Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage details the history of New York City's (NYC) politics by centering and tracing the development of the infamous Rikers Island penal colony. Shanahan argues NYC's city jails played a pivotal role in the city's evolution and in shaping the lives of its residents. He examines the city's continuums and shifts from New Deal policies and liberal penal welfarism to the neoliberal turn that accompanied the rise of law and order. According to Shanahan, NYC became a testing ground for austerity measures brought by the international restructuring of capitalism and a neoliberal model for the rest of the nation. Moreover, Shanahan reveals the historical role progressive penal reformers played in the formation of Rikers Island and how their “well-intentioned” efforts led to the mass expansion of city jails in NYC. Importantly, Shanahan notes the significant role city jails have in the development of the carceral state.
Shanahan demonstrates that Rikers Island was the result of calls for reform and struggles among law enforcement unions, city officials, incarcerated people inspired by revolutionary activists, penal welfare liberal reformers, and correctional administrators. Crucially, Shanahan contextualizes the numerous revolts inside NYC jails as part of a class struggle. He argues that such uprisings were inspired by demographic, political, and economic national shifts caused by deindustrialization, neoliberalism, austerity, and the broader historically produced systems of racial social order that left many recently arrived Puerto Rican and Southern migrants unemployed and entrapped in poverty. According to Shanahan, jails helped manage, store, and prevent the “disorder” of surplus labor, and displace the blame for NYC's deteriorating conditions onto working-class people by presenting their captivity as the solution.
Shanahan offers us an analytical history and political critique of NYC's mass jail expansion projects through an engagement with archival documents regarding carceral institutions, prisoner testimonies, and conversations with Board of Correction members and staff. Shanahan was moved to document the history of Rikers and NYC by his own arrest and incarceration in Rikers after his participation in protests supporting the 2014 Ferguson uprisings. Additionally, he drew from prisoner-run newspapers such as Rikers Review. Notably, Shanahan acknowledges the limits of penal journalism and admits that his sources might be heavily skewed toward the Department of Correction’s perspective. He tries to contrast these dynamics by engaging the memoirs and voices of revolutionaries, such as Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and Kuwasi Balagoon.
The first few chapters of Captives discuss the 1954 ascendancy of penal welfarist Anna M. Kross as Commissioner of NYC's Department of Correction. Kross was a social reformer intent on restructuring the agency and transforming jails from warehouses into facilities with rehabilitative resources. Kross wanted to shift the power from guards to clinical experts, social scientists, and social workers so that carceral institutions could help reshape prisoners, aiming to convert the Department of Correction’s facilities into centers for research on crime and delinquency. In her vision, captives could be used as test subjects by advanced students of psychology, psychiatry, education, anthropology, sociology, and public administration to study the social and medical problems of public health. Shanahan notes that in 1961, Rikers began to be used as a training ground for students in New York University’s graduate School of Social Work.
Shanahan details how Kross’ proposals ultimately called for the expansion of NYC's carceral institutions. She acquired funding to transform jails into sites of “human engineering,” by claiming the department needed modernization and more facilities to reduce the guard-to-prisoner ratio. In addition, proposed liberal reforms began to synthesize court, police, and jail systems with social work services and further entrenched the carceral state into the lives of working-class people, monitoring their work, housekeeping, and school attendance. Crisis in NYC jails was often met with calls to expand institutions to reduce the prisoner population, but each expansion was met with the increased warehousing of NYC's predominately Black and Brown working-class residents. This impact was further exacerbated by recurring hysteria over urban disorder that tasked Rikers with absorbing the symptoms of social problems that city leaders were unwilling to address at the root. Law enforcement unions, such as the Correctional Officers’ Benevolent Association, also fostered panics as they selfishly fought to resist reform efforts, expand operating budgets, and maintain unquestioned control of city jails at the expense of NYC residents facing austerity.
In his interrogation of proposed reforms, Shanahan examines the historical limits and possibilities of civilian oversight committees and litigation efforts such as Rhem v. McGrath (p. 195). He details the development of NYC's Board of Correction, which was to oversee the long-term planning and construction of jail facilities and provide a voice for the imprisoned. The board was responsible for establishing minimum standards of care and preventing the abuse of incarcerated people. The board administered a prisoner grievance program and worked to get Department of Correction facilities in compliance with the federal courts. Nonetheless, they had limited oversight capacity and could not effect dramatic change, particularly in the face of persistent pushback from correctional officers. Ultimately, NYC responded with expansion and did the least to meet court-mandated standards. Shanahan also details how nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and Vera Institute sanitized radical proposals with palatable legal forms that preserved the racial capitalist social order. The rise of nonprofits became a privatized response to austerity, driven by ties to big business that invested in New York's public welfare out of economic interests in real estate development. This tied the NYC government's viability to profits in real estate and finance.
Captives is a must read for organizers and academics interested in dismantling the carceral state. Shanahan's work enhances our understanding of the rise of the carceral state by bringing attention to local city politics and jail expansion as venues of mass imprisonment. He reminds us that jails, although separate entities from prisons, are integral to the criminal justice system and play a pivotal role in structuring communities. Further, Shanahan reveals how the push for jail expansion in NYC was partly facilitated by law enforcement unions who in addition to state lobbying, have built their political power through pressure on local and city governments. This local infiltration has impacted municipal city governments and absorbed city budgets, resulting in negative ramifications for NYC residents.
Shanahan demonstrates that not only is reform insufficient, but in NYC's case, it further expanded the carceral state. My single suggestion to strengthen the text would be to provide a deeper interrogation of the pathologizing nature of penal welfarists’ underlying assumptions about those held captive and to privilege deeper engagement with the theorizing that emerged from incarcerated people participating and leading the various rebellions in NYC's jails. However, the author states at the outset that he is limited by his archive and his accessible sources tend to privilege the Department of Correction's perspective. Despite this, Shanahan's work powerfully demonstrates the importance of county jails as sites of anti-imperialist and anti-racist resistance, and offers invaluable contributions to abolitionist scholarship and studies about mass imprisonment. Shanahan displays the immense violence perpetrated by reforms that reallocate funds to police and correctional officers’ unions, rob working-class citizens of wealth and assets, and sacrifice the livelihoods of working-class people. This book will help readers make sense of how our lives are structured by the shifts in capitalism and its influence on local city politics, but most importantly how dangerous liberal reforms can be to our livelihoods.