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Newport, Melanie D.

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

Penn (Philadelphia)

2023



OUR SYNOPSIS: Melanie D. Newport focuses on local jails to examine the development of the American carceral state. By telling the stories of incarcerated people along with jail reformers and administrators at Chicago’s Cook County Jail, she demonstrates the centrality of local politics to jail experiences. Unlike state and federal prisons, jails are managed locally. She argues, “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.” (12) She also amplifies instances where people incarcerated at Cook County Jail found ways to assert their humanity and resist oppression, ranging from the jail newspaper The Grapevine to full-scale rebellion.

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • How did the social function of Chicago jails change over the course of the twentieth century?

  • What forms of resistance by people experiencing incarceration have proved the most effective?

  • To what extent did the Civil Rights Movement extend into jails?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “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 hail’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.” (15-16)

  • “The existence of jails is antithetical to racial justice.” (285)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

  • N/A

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