This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration

By Melanie Newport

While state and federal prisons like Attica and Alcatraz occupy a central place in the national consciousness, most incarceration in the United States occurs within the walls of local jails. In This Is My Jail, Melanie D. Newport situates the late twentieth-century escalation of mass incarceration in a longer history of racialized, politically repressive jailing. Centering the political actions of people until now overlooked—jailed people, wardens, corrections officers, sheriffs, and the countless community members who battled over the functions and impact of jails—Newport shows how local, grassroots contestation shaped the rise of the carceral state.

As ground zero for struggles over criminal justice reform, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, jails in Chicago and Cook County were models for jailers and advocates across the nation who aimed to redefine jails as institutions of benevolent transformation. From a slave sale on the jail steps to new jail buildings to electronic monitoring, from therapy to job training, these efforts further criminalized jailed people and diminished their capacity to organize for their civil rights. With prisoners as famous as Al Capone, Dick Gregory, and Harold Washington, and a place in culture ranging from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle to B. B. King’s Live in Cook County Jail, This Is My Jail places jails at the heart of twentieth-century urban life and politics.

As a sweeping history of urban incarceration, This Is My Jail shows that jails are critical sites of urban inequality that sustain the racist actions of the police and judges and exacerbate the harms wrought by housing discrimination, segregated schools, and inaccessible health care. Structured by liberal anti-Blackness and legacies of violence, today’s jails reflect longstanding local commitments to the unfreedom of poor people of color.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781512823509

Book preview

Cover Page for This Is My Jail

This Is My Jail

Politics and Culture in Modern America

Series Editors: Keisha N. Blain, Margot Canaday, Matthew Lassiter, Stephen Pitti, Thomas J. Sugrue

Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

This Is My Jail

Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration

Melanie D. Newport

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Hardcover ISBN 9781512823493

Ebook ISBN 9781512823509

A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For my parents

and for all people harmed by jailing

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction. Whose Good Intentions?

Chapter 1. The Least Human of American Institutions

Chapter 2. Forgotten Men

Chapter 3. A Model Detention Camp

Chapter 4. Games of Political Power

Chapter 5. Control Comes First

Chapter 6. More and More Jails

Epilogue. The Persistence of Good Intentions

Notes

Archives Consulted

Index

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

AAPB American Archive of Public Broadcasting (WGBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA, and Washington, DC

AAPL Afro-American Patrolmen’s League

ACLU-IL America Civil Liberties Union Illinois Division Records

ADW Atlanta Daily World

AER Alliance to End Repression Papers

AMK Anna Moscowitz Kross Papers

BGA Better Government Association

BOP Bureau of Prisons

BS Baltimore Sun

CA Chicago American

CAC Comer Archive of Chicago in the Year 2000

CAR Citizens Alert Records

CCBF Chicago Community Bond Fund

CCDOC Cook County Department of Corrections

CCPA Combined Counties Police Association

CCSBP Cook County Special Bail Project

CD Chicago Defender

CDN Chicago Daily News

CDT Chicago Daily Tribune

CES Charlotte E. Senechalle Papers

CHM Chicago History Museum Research Center

CORE Congress of Racial Equality

CPD Chicago Police Department

CPL-HW Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Library Center

CST Chicago Sun-Times

CSTC Chicago Sun-Times Collection

CT Chicago Tribune

CUL Chicago Urban League Records

DCSI Department of Community Supervision and Intervention

DFP Detroit Free Press

DNC Democratic National Convention

DOJ Department of Justice

DUF Detroit Under Fire Digital Archive, Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, University of Michigan

EG Elmer Gertz Collection

ETRC Educational Television and Radio Center

EWB Ernest Watson Burgess Papers

FKH Fred K. Hoehler Papers

GFPL Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library

GIU Gang Intelligence Unit

HTLM Harry S. Truman Library and Museum

HWM Hans W. Mattick Papers

ILAC Illinois Academy of Criminology

ILDOC Illinois Department of Corrections

ILEC Illinois Law Enforcement Commission

JHA John Howard Association

JHAP John Howard Association Papers

JR Julius Rosenwald Papers

LAT Los Angeles Times

LEAA Law Enforcement Assistance Association

LWVCC League of Women Voters of Cook County Records

MIPP Mothers in Prison Project

MRC Municipal Reference Collection

NU Northwestern University, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections

NYT New York Times

OLEA Office of Law Enforcement Assistance

PACE Programmed Activities for Correctional Education

ROR Release on Recognizance

SCSC Smith College Special Collections

SJP Stanley J. Pottinger Papers

SORT Special Operations Response Team

UC-SCRC University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center

UIC-SC University of Illinois Chicago Special Collections

UM-SW University of Minnesota Libraries, Social Welfare History Archives

WCMC Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers

WP Washington Post

WSJ Wall Street Journal

Introduction

Whose Good Intentions?

All politics are local, and the politics of mass incarceration depend on local jails. Between 1955 and 2019, the annual number of jail admissions exploded from approximately one million to 10.3 million people, with a peak of 13.6 million in 2008. As of 2020, there were more than thirty-one hundred jails nationwide with budgets that have reached $25 billion a year. Jailing is a vast and costly enterprise. In contrast to state and federal prisons, jails are managed at the local level, whether in big cities, sprawling suburbs, or small towns. Metropolitan areas contain the largest jails, including Los Angeles County Jail, with almost twenty thousand prisoners; Rikers Island in New York, with approximately fourteen thousand prisoners; and Cook County Department of Corrections (CCDOC) in Chicago, with nearly six thousand prisoners.¹ While national data shows that 33 percent of jailed people are Black and 14 percent are Latinx, jail demographics differ dramatically from place to place. For example, in the CCDOC, which includes prisoners from the city of Chicago, 75 percent of prisoners are Black and 16 percent of prisoners are Latinx. This makeup is the consequence of racist policing, high bails set by courts, and, perhaps most importantly, the politically contested, racialized ideas about what jails can do for people of color.²

Over the course of the twentieth century, going back to the Progressive Era, local jail reformers and politicians have relied on racist ideologies to promote jails as rehabilitative institutions that could solve their cities’ social ills, an effective argument that has ensured continued jail expansion. Focusing on the racism that shapes jail policy undermines one of the most enduring myths of criminal justice: that policymakers are informed by their good intentions and that anything else that happens, including the disproportionate jailing of people of color, is an unintended consequence.³

That racist ideologies fueled the changing nature and functions of local jails over the course of the twentieth century is essential for understanding the national scourge of mass incarceration. Taken for granted as just another carceral institution, a temporary way station en route to more serious confinement in state prisons, jails, with their history of aggressive growth, have been portrayed as endpoints of urban inequality rather than as intentionally perpetuating it. Beliefs about the benevolent intentions of jailing, particularly the capacity of jails to ensure rehabilitation, became increasingly important strategies for laundering the illegitimacy of racist policing and judicial practices through other institutions. In modern urban America, jails developed a particular utility as institutions of racial benevolence that rationalized the racism of policing and local politics through active transformation of the lives of prisoners. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, concerns about the political demands of marginalized people, particularly jailed people, fueled the growth of jails that could enforce racial regulation in postwar cities. To be purely punitive in response to crime was never enough. The triumph of racialized criminalization and repression of prisoners’ rights fostered a political culture in which mass jailing was not only possible but viewed as necessary. The story of mass incarceration begins in American jails. And the story of American jails begins with local politics.⁴

The entwined stories of Alsana Caruth, Winston Moore, and Claudia McCormick illuminate the influence of local politics in shaping the institutional culture of violence and domination within jails, against which jailed people have struggled, as well as the long-standing hopes for the abolition of jailing altogether. Pre-trial detainees are merely political slaves, Caruth declared in 1975, referring to those held in jail with a presumption of innocence after being charged with a crime.⁵ Caruth, awaiting trial in in CCDOC, submitted his testimony to the federal courts in Duran v. Elrod, a class action suit filed in Chicago on behalf of prisoners by legal aid lawyers in 1974, documenting the dehumanizing abuse involved in every day and night’s existence, as a pre-trial detainee. The suit aimed to hold the Cook County Sheriff and executive director of the CCDOC accountable for conditions in the overcrowded jail. Although most prisoners retained a presumption of innocence as they awaited their day in court, many slept on floors and tables; prisoners were seldom let outside and were allowed only two visits from adults each month; their mail was heavily censored if it came at all. Jailed people in the suit claimed they were subject to harsh punishments, ranging from beatings to being put in solitary confinement without knowing why.

After nineteen months in jail, Caruth could not get over the fact that he experienced subhuman conditions due to his inability to pay the Cook County Criminal Courts $1200.50 dollars in American currency, for his liberty. Here Caruth was referring to his inability to make bail—he could not pay the bond amount set by a judge to guarantee he appeared at trial. He wanted the courts to protect his due process rights—the right to a speedy trial and the presumption of innocence—as well as to ensure he was free from cruel and unusual punishment. Caruth was part of a long procession of jailed Black people, from Charles Pile, who tried to burn the jail down in the 1860s, to Dick Gregory, jailed with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, who experienced such conditions. Caruth begged the courts to understand what jail meant to him and other poor black and brown detainees: rather than an institution of reform, it was a symbol of racist practices that pervaded the entire criminal justice system.⁶

Caruth was jailed by a man named Winston Moore, who had gained national renown as a jail reformer and was perhaps the nation’s first Black jail warden. As head of the CCDOC, Moore often talked about how the makeup of his jail was 90 percent Black. He hired a nearly all-Black guard staff and hosted jail concerts that featured performers such as B. B. King and Stevie Wonder. Implementing his Building Program and Master Plan, Moore carried out the largest single-site jail expansion project in American history. This is my dream, Moore said of his many reforms.⁷ He was not unusual in dreaming of jail reform. In the early 1900s, Cook County Jail warden John Whitman had imagined the jail could be a benevolent institution where prisoners were transformed. In the 1950s, sheriff Joseph Lohman believed jailers could rehabilitate people only if they responded seriously to prisoners’ concerns about the injustices they faced. Coming to power amid the unrest and tragedies of 1968, Moore had come to his own conclusions: You cannot have rehabilitation without control, so control comes first.⁸

Moore’s belief in control meant his personal authority was paramount; it left little space for resistance. A protester arrested during Chicago’s Democratic National Convention in 1968 recalled Moore telling him, You are a forgotten man! This is my jail!⁹ Guards remembered these kinds of comments too. Testifying in court in 1977 after Moore was charged with aggravated battery, official misconduct, and perjury, a corrections officer recounted that Moore had shouted, Why are you trying to break out of my jail? before punching a prisoner in the face.¹⁰ But Moore knew that his sense of personal ownership did not matter much in the larger scope of county politics. As long as everything was fallen down over here, I could be in charge, he mused as he faced being fired. The jail expansion had changed everything. To Moore, the reasons were clear: Too much power for a black man to control.¹¹

Other visions of what the jail was for and could do for people were reflected in the actions of Claudia McCormick, a Black woman hired by Moore to run the women’s division that opened in 1973. The author of a landmark report asserting that women in jail were often victims of crime themselves, McCormick looked for ways to use the jail to help women. Some of the jailed women were skeptical about this kind of power and what it meant—they got the black woman’s face and the white man’s image, prisoner Sherron Jackson wrote in a poem about the jail matrons.¹²

McCormick gave space in the new Women’s Division of CCDOC to the Mothers in Prison Project (MIPP), a project of the American Friends Service Committee. In their little corner of the jail, MIPP’s volunteers and a few full-time staff coordinated with McCormick and outside agencies to ensure women avoided charges of neglect and termination of their parental rights while they were incarcerated. MIPP’s work depended on fulfilling many seemingly small requests: calling family members to tell them bond money was needed, getting women clean clothes for court dates, and arranging to bring the small children to court so their mother may have a glimpse. When one jailed mother, Dorothy, faced loss of custody of her seventeen-day-old baby as he recovered from surgery, MIPP found a friend who could pay half of her $100 bond. Women in the jail donated their commissary money to pay for the rest.¹³ MIPP called its work a start—a citizens’ initiative to ease the pain, to increase public concern, and to show that there are ways to solve some of our society’s most difficult problems.¹⁴ In the case of MIPP, prisoners, community members, and an administrator understood that a woman’s freedom was the best solution to the problems jail caused in her life.

By the late twentieth century, jails and jail reform had become essential to the exercise of carceral power in the urban United States. Alsana Caruth, Winston Moore, Claudia McCormick, and members of MIPP were part of a constellation of local political actors who, from the nineteenth century to the present, have been concerned with what jailing means for people who are incarcerated while awaiting trial and serving short sentences. Over the course of the twentieth century, jails expanded their functions to facilitate racialized criminalization. Sheriffs and jail administrators frequently asserted that they had no control over whom police and courts sent to jails even as they created new mechanisms for the preservation and perpetuation of racial inequality. Tensions over the jail’s subordinate status among criminal justice institutions and the commitments of local leaders to expanding its functions established the conditions for the local escalation of the mass incarceration of poor people of color.

What Are Jails?

Jails are significant arbiters of local racial politics and play an important role in criminalizing the poor. Unlike police lockups, which briefly detain people initially after arrest, or prisons, which house people after felony sentencing, jails typically incarcerate adults after arrest, as they await trial after bond hearings, and after sentencing for misdemeanor or petty offenses. Unlike prisons, freedom from jail often has a price: who can pay bond amounts set by a judge reflects the broader contours of racial capitalism, through which our economic system, underpinned as it is by the history and practice of slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide, is defined by a tendency . . . to differentiate according to race.¹⁵ Other functions of jails include holding people while they await transfer to prison, detention of immigrants, incarceration of children, and punishment for parole violation or nonpayment of fines. Through jails, cities and counties become custodians responsible for the detention and care of individuals for periods of time that can range from a few hours while awaiting bail bond payment to years awaiting trial. That jails range from having a few beds to over ten thousand speaks to their varied functions across localities. As jails are locally contingent institutions, the proportion of the jail population that is pretrial or sentenced has varied according to time, place, and local politics; so too has the proportion of prisoners who are people of color.¹⁶

For as long as there have been Black people in Chicago, they have been disproportionately represented in its jails. Chicago’s jails began as places for outsiders excluded from the affluence that made Chicago such a vibrant, prosperous metropolis. Operated by the city, the Bridewell, the House of Correction, and the House of Correction farm originated in the nineteenth century to detain people who worked to pay back fines to the city and those awaiting trial for petty crimes, particularly immigrants and Black southern migrants. Multiple iterations of the Cook County Jail, established in the 1830s and moved to the West Side in 1929, served to detain people accused of crimes, those serving short sentences, and, in an unusual practice specific to Illinois jails at this time, those awaiting execution in the jail’s gallows and electric chair. Since the mid-twentieth century, Black people have made up a majority of its prisoners. After the merger of the House of Correction and the Cook County Jail into the Cook County Department of Corrections in the late 1960s, pretrial detention has been the primary reason people are jailed in Chicago; since the late 1980s, those who are not trusted with complete pretrial freedom have been incarcerated in their homes using electronic shackles.

Jail governance reproduces the priorities of local governments whose power is shaped by a broader white supremacist political system. Jails are subject to influence that can include that of city or county commissions, mayors, judges, prosecutors, and elected sheriffs. Sheriffs operate many of the nation’s jails, making jails exceptional as the only incarcerating institutions directly controlled by elected officials. Patronage politics, in which partisan loyalties shape who gets jobs and contracts and how much oversight there is, remain an underappreciated influence on jail conditions. While many texts have emphasized the premodern origins of jails, the modern jail is a vestige of Jim Crow politics that has been continually reconfigured since Reconstruction.¹⁷

Understanding jails as historically contingent institutions constituted by Jim Crow logic calls into question common assumptions held by corrections experts over the past century.¹⁸ Observers throughout the postwar era perpetuated the idea of the timeless, enduring quality of jails and their largely poor populations. The most prominent critical jail study of the last forty years, John Irwin’s The Jail, remains the bedrock of how experts have viewed the functions of jails. Irwin understood jails as places for the rabble—people who were not criminals, in his view, but who were consigned to society’s lowest class because they were disorderly. While Irwin noted that race often overrides all other visible qualities in the assignment of disrepute, he did not connect race to one of his most significant provocations—that the jail, not the prison, imposes the cruelest form of punishment in the United States.¹⁹ Attention to the political development of jails over time shows how the purposeful racialization of jails shaped efforts to determine and justify their evolving functions. Put simply, when it came to jail politics and policymaking, it mattered when people in jail were Black.²⁰

The Importance of Reform and Intent

To gain a full picture of the motivations that fueled jail reform, this book considers the intentions of jail administrators and reformers alongside those of prisoners and their advocates. As people have asserted their visions for carceral institutions and their own lives within them, they have made calculated choices about how to transform them. The experimental quality of American incarceration is a product of this continual pattern of deliberate change. For example, historian Rebecca McLennan has shown that early prisons existed in a permanent state of crisis and became legitimated as institutions only through ongoing destructive and creative attempts at reform.²¹ Abolitionist scholars have argued reforms serve to strengthen the relationship between everyday carceral policymaking and entrenched historical processes of capitalism, settler colonialism, and racial state building.²² Ruth Wilson Gilmore has shown that many reformist reforms tend to tweak Armageddon instead of finding ways to improve the circumstances of people within the carceral system.²³ Fusing these approaches makes clear that the relentless reform of jails and their position as institutions of perpetual harm is inextricable from the undeniable role of race and racism in the institutional and political development of jails.

Historical critique of the role of reform reveals the workings of racial statecraft at the local level. In the contemporary criminal justice reform moment, policymakers have promoted right-sizing or optimizing carceral populations, budgets, and processes as an objective and race-neutral means of restoring credibility to a carceral system undermined by rampant racial inequality. As policymakers promote their embrace of evidence-based solutions, it is critical that the complex role of race is centered in conversations about how to approach jail reform and decarceration more broadly.²⁴

Tracking the relationship of local politics to jailing offers a more nuanced approach to the idea of mass incarceration because it brings into clearer view just how significant the state’s awareness of the racial makeup of jails was to their growth.²⁵ In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration is a racial caste system through which the criminal justice system’s laws, policies, customs, and institutions . . . operate collectively to ensure the subordinate state of a group defined largely by race.²⁶ Other scholars, including David Garland, have famously claimed that mass imprisonment is a historically specific shift marked by both the rates of imprisonment and its extension to groups, not only individuals, a transformation that occurred during the late twentieth century.²⁷ Incorporating a deeper historical and local perspective illuminates how the logics of mass incarceration became enmeshed with institutional development. As Dylan Rodríguez has shown, the political discourse around mass incarceration often implies a dysfunctional state built through unintended consequences rather than a state working as intended.²⁸ As local institutions of confinement, jails are well suited for identifying points of planning, deliberation, and conflict over whose good intentions matter most because they offer a localized perspective on the workings of cause and effect in racial statecraft.

Thinking about mass incarceration less as an outcome and more as a component of an ongoing process of local governance helps us to appreciate that mass incarceration is a feature of a broader approach to racial statecraft manifest in the formation of a carceral state. Tracking the ongoing development of the carceral state, an evolving set of political tools used by historical actors to negotiate power through mass incarceration, brings into view how laws, policies, linked institutions, and agencies are manipulated in the service of the interconnected goals of controlling crime and remaking criminalization of marginalized populations through policing, detention and incarceration, education and rehabilitation, punishment and sanctions, and surveillance. The occurrence of mass incarceration does not mean that the carceral state has operated in a singular, coordinated manner; rather, it reflects perpetual negotiations about what government can and should do, negotiations that are constrained by preexisting institutions and ideologies.

As a project grounded in liberalism, twentieth-century jail reform hinged on creating urban spaces that gave substance to promises about what the government could do for citizens. This book focuses on the development of Chicago’s jails as urban regulatory institutions for the control of immigrants, political radicals, and people of color. As historian Nathan Connolly shows, the liberalism that emerged during the long era of Jim Crow was preoccupied with the controlled placement of black people that preferred to keep the regulation of black life in the hands of powerful whites. The liberal history of jailing began with the determination that jails, as bastions of this paternalistic approach, were essential facets of racial regulation in American cities.²⁹ Over time, reformers and public officials continued to rationalize jails as institutions that offered social benefits because of their role in maintaining racial control. Looking closely at jailing during the 1950s through the 1970s shows the development of an explicit commitment to racialized institution building as jailers faced new civil rights demands. Imposing normative ideals about gender on prisoners was a central feature of this project. The pivot to neoliberal racial innocence in the 1980s and 1990s was intertwined with efforts to consolidate white political authority amid Black political ascendance in municipal politics. This liberalism has faced challenges both from corrupt politicians who have sought to keep jails in service of political patronage and from prisoners, reformers, and abolitionists who, with varying degrees of success, have attempted to constrain the most virulent expressions of local carceral power.³⁰

From the establishment of Chicago’s first jail in the 1830s through World War II, transformations to jailing responded to European immigrants and Black migrants and justified a broader commitment to white settler profiteering and corruption in jail governance. The rise of city workhouses, the Bridewell and the House of Correction, relied on carceral labor for the management of the urban poor. From their earliest years, jails were important sources of political jobs that were distributed to those who turned out votes. The House of Correction was developed as a self-sustaining institution that would profit off the labor of people working off city fines. The fee system, through which government paid jailers per capita and allowed jailers to keep funds that were unspent, made Cook County Jail a site of personal financial gain for sheriffs. In response to these functions of jails, Progressive reformers debated jail abolition and the possibility of replacing jails with new state-run institutions for pretrial detention.

Amid urban development and exploitation through capitalism, Chicago’s early jails played an important role in disciplining men who failed to conform to their prescribed roles as workers in the system of urban wage labor. The 1919 Race Riot served as a crucial turning point for the acceptance of jailing as a necessity that outweighed concerns about political self-dealing. The removal of Cook County Jail from downtown to the West Side was part of a larger attempt to protect white wealth and improve the capacity of the city and county jails to isolate and control people who existed outside the white mainstream. Amid the Great Depression and World War II, jails remained potent symbols of white authority even as many beds remained empty.

The era of racialized institution building took shape in the 1950s as those who operated Chicago’s jails, and those in other large counties and cities across the United States, faced the fact that they lacked the spatial infrastructure—not to mention staffing and programs—to sustain a postwar political order aiming to defend democracy through crackdowns on perceived menaces to the legitimacy of the state: drunk drivers, narcotics users and sellers, career criminals, gangs of juvenile delinquents, and even people demanding civil rights. Jailers during the 1950s rapidly realized that the long-standing austere governance of jails made it difficult to legitimate the social exclusion needed to sustain the goals of idealistic, law-abiding white Americans conditioned to the fruits of post–New Deal America.³¹

It was in this era that Cook County sheriff Joseph Lohman hoped to make the jail a place of rehabilitation and racial assimilation through a program to improve race relations. He aimed to bring the jail into postwar liberalism by expanding the rehabilitative capacity of Cook County Jail but feared that public knowledge of the race of prisoners would diminish the appeal of his political project. Reframing the jail’s predominantly Black population as the community of the condemned, Lohman hoped individual rehabilitation would make it easier for formerly incarcerated people to rejoin society and avoid the structural inequalities that he believed caused crime in the first place. At the same time, jailed people responded to the dominant political assumptions about their criminality through development of a new prisoner consciousness in which they sought access to the humanity and dignity so implicit in the Cold War worldview. Jail newspapers, radio, and television—venues created to engender harmonious race relations—gave prisoners a platform to articulate how jailing harmed them and to stake claims to citizenship as forgotten men. In this, prisoners demanded a rethinking of the mission of jails, a departure from the warehousing premise their jails had been designed for, and yet they did so while constantly asking policymakers to value their freedom. These appeals established a jail politics in which prisoners demanded to be heard and believed even as their claims were manipulated in the service of a reform agenda that cast the jail in race-neutral terms.

Amid the transformation of Chicago’s jails into sites of majority Black incarceration in the late 1950s and the 1960s, jailed people contested the notion that jails were an ideal form of implementing urban racial uplift as jailers and sheriffs alike traded on patriarchal benevolence and their ability, as men and fathers, to civilize people in jail. In the early 1960s, Cook County Jail death row prisoner Paul Crump drew on his status as a rehabilitated prisoner to fight for his life and freedom. The state’s unwillingness to offer Crump his freedom did not deter other efforts. As the city of Chicago, Cook County, and the state of Illinois took on urban renewal and catered to the metropolitan interests of suburbanites, Black prisoners joined with the civil rights movement to critique the racism and appalling conditions they encountered in the urban jail.³² With the help of comedian Dick Gregory, prisoners used sit-ins, hunger strikes, and new coalitions to challenge jail governance; jail staff organized in opposition to the racism of administrators.

Suburban interests mattered deeply to the broader struggle for jail reform. Through the Cook County League of Women Voters, questions about the government’s obligations to jailed people reached the level of legislative and state constitutional reform. The concerns of these suburban activists centered on making jails symbols of good government as they attempted to formalize the jail’s mission to correct behavior and remove jails from the corrupt oversight of local politicians. Organizing for and not with prisoners, those working for such reforms sustained a broader agenda of municipal housekeeping prevalent among affluent white women who sought to produce political accountability across city boundaries.³³ Merging the Cook County Jail and Chicago House of Correction became the focal point of a jail reform movement fixated on reform to patronage politics that diverted attention from the concerns of Black prisoners and staff even as it centered racialized justifications for jailing. Using gendered pathologies around Black manhood that framed men in jail as psychologically damaged and lazy, white liberals proposed a new, intergovernmental corrections agency that would merge the jails into a rehabilitative institution controlled by experts and accountable to community members.

The struggle for jail reform took new forms amid the fires of urban unrest in the late 1960s. The context of perceived escalating urban violence—crime in the streets—gave greater purchase to concerns about the dangerous situations developing in urban jails as judges filled them with large numbers of pretrial detainees.³⁴ Again facing the consequences of intensified policing amid President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Crime initiated in 1965, overcrowded jails in the 1960s confronted the consequences of state-sanctioned violence. Chicago’s best-known instances of urban violence during this time, including the murder of Chicago Black Panther Party chair Fred Hampton, the police riot at the Democratic National Convention, and the uprising after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, were mirrored by shocking murders and beatings within jails.³⁵ Such violence—inside and outside jails—led to depictions of Cook County Jail as a jungle of Black brutes and white victims that created new pressures for policymakers to reconsider the functions of city and county jails.

Sheriff Joseph Woods used the dehumanization of prisoners and civil rights protestors as a means of destroying the political legitimacy of prisoner appeals for reform. In the name of law and order, Woods hired

Reviews for This Is My Jail

[pomo58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This Is My Jail by Melanie Newport is a look at the large issue of mass incarceration through the lens of local jails, specifically Cook County and the Chicago area. This is both a history and a sociological study, weaving the events and the ideas together to form a picture that shows the many missteps, intentional and not, in the constant and ongoing carceral reform movement(s) over time. There are the usual suspects, those who truly don't care about people because of their race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic group, but this also highlights those who mean well but don't offer changes that shift the paradigm, thus continuing to support the racist structure which is our "justice" system.While the book is both informative and a good read, I was less impressed with the writing. It wasn't bad, far from it, but where something could have been stated more concisely Newport seemed to often opt for expressing it in what many take to be "academic" writing. First, this is an academic text even though it is accessible to any reader interested, so a certain level of such writing is expected even when not necessary. Second, and more to my point, is that writing that is more complex than necessary for what is being expressed is self-defeating. Many readers who might be able to use this in their activism may choose to skip it and read any of the other good books available on the topic. In other words, this appears to be more concerned with appealing to other academics than with those actually involved in the fight. That is disappointing.Disappointment aside, this is a valuable work that needs to be read, or at least understood, by those on the ground. Highly recommended and, for those who are usually turned off by convoluted writing, stick with it, it is still quite accessible. Just read for the key points, they are important.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.