The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration

Edited by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Judah Schept Verso 2/13/2024, paperback SKU: 9781804291313   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 sp