The Jail Is Everywhere: The Quiet Jail Boom & The Insidious Logic Of Carceral Humanism / Lydia Pelot-Hobbs + Jack Norton

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and Jack Norton, co-editors of the collection The Jail is Everywhere, join me in this interview to discuss the “quiet jail boom” in numerous counties across the United States. They examine how the county jail has become the preeminent site of the adaptive, expansive, and shapeshifting carceral state, as well as the local and nationwide struggles to end it.

The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration is edited by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, Jack Norton, and Judah Schept, with contributions by, and interviews with, numerous anti-jail organizers across the United States. It was published through Verso Books.

“All of this helps us understand this one moment of jail expansion as one piece of this broader story of mass incarceration, and helps us understand the ways mass criminalization is central to the neoliberal state project. It is not tangential; it is at the center of it.”

- Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

“So in that sense, it’s important to know how all these pieces work, but at the same time, it’s just as important to understand that the police are between us and what we need to live. And this jail expansion—this quiet jail boom we’re talking about—Cop City and the police training centers where they’re going to train people to put down the insurrections that are going to happen when we are separated even more from means of subsistence—all these plans are development plans. These are different levels of the state working with capital to plan the future.”

- Jack Norton

Bios:

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an Assistant Professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, and author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana.

Jack Norton is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University, and was a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice. He conducted research for the In Our Backyards initiative and investigated how counties across the United States use their local jails.

Episode Notes:

Learn more about The Jail is Everywhere and purchase a copy from Verso Books or Bookshop.

Read an excerpt from the book at The Baffler.

Music produced by Epik The Dawn.