This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration (Politics and Culture in Modern America)

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 el