RT Article
T1 New York City's captive work force: Remembering the prisoners who built Rikers Island
JF International journal of law, crime and justice
VO 56
SP 13
OP 26
A1 Shanahan, Jarrod
A2 Mooney, Jayne
LA English
YR 2019
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1684444519
AB This article undertakes a "history of the present" as a means of intervening in current debate around the closure of the Rikers Island jail complex and its replacement with smaller "state of the art" jails. We argue that the telling of carceral history is potentially a powerful weapon capable of shaping unfolding events, as well as, helping to preserve the memory of those who have suffered from the practice of human caging. To this effect we reconstruct the history of the Rikers Island penal colony predating its officially-recognized opening in 1935; a history defined by the forced prison labour that was used to expand the island and construct the original penitentiary. We illustrate how the labour of these prisoners, lives on in the physical structure of Rikers, as well as in its scandalous carceral existence. In defiance of current efforts at piecemeal reform or of preserving the status quo, we offer this historical intervention as a means of problematizing the present effort to solve the problems of jails with more jails, suggesting instead that the past calls for more drastic action—an escape.
K1 Jails
K1 New York city department of correction
K1 New York city history
K1 Prison abolition
K1 Prison labor
K1 Prison reform
K1 Prisons
K1 Resistance
K1 Rikers island
K1 Structural racism
DO 10.1016/j.ijlcj.2018.11.001