A vital collection from a key battleground in the abolition
struggle: the County Jail.
Nearly every county
and major city in the United States has a jail, the short-term
detention center controlled by local sheriffs that funnels people
into prisons and long-term incarceration. While the growing movement
against incarceration and policing has called to reform or abolish
prisons, jails have often gone unnoticed, or in some cases seen as a
“better” alternative to prisons.”
Yet jails, in recent
decades, have been the fastest-growing sector of the US carceral
state. Jails are widely used for immigrant detention by ICE and the
U.S. Marshals and as a place to offload people that prisons can’t
hold. As jails grow, they transform the region around them, and whole
towns and small cities see health care, mental health care, substance
abuse, and employment opportunities taken over by carceral concerns.
If jails are
everywhere, resistance to jails is too. The recent jail boom has
sparked a wealth of local activist struggles to resist and close
jails all across the United States, from rural counties to major
cities.
The Jail Is
Everywhere brings these disparate voices together, with
contributions from activists, scholars, and expert journalists
describing the effects of this quiet jail boom, mapping the growth of
the carceral state, and sharing strategies from recent fights against
jail construction to strengthen struggles against jailing everywhere.
With a foreword by
Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
