Captives How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage

"Beyond elucidating how Rikers has influenced municipal politics, Captives asks how jailing contributed to the newest iteration of a racialized social order in New York, which then spread to the rest of the country...From his perspective on Rikers looking back at the Manhattan skyline, Shanahan realized that jails are not only a critical component of the city's social order, but that they are the necessary opposite of New York's famous destinations...To incorporate this source material effectively, Shanahan engages with incarcerated people on a number of levels, including the conditions of their arrest, their political networks, and their personal lives..Shanahan shows how the violence that holds New York City jails together was built up through guards' enforcement and administrative reforms over the preceding decades...Captives shows that the DOC will never solve the problems on Rikers...Their outsize role in the public budget only exacerbates the city's racist and exploitative economic system...To fix Rikers, you have to fix New York."

"Shanahan's new book, Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage, traces in detail the competing political agendas that produced Rikers, following the history of the city's jails from the 1950s up through the end of Ed Koch's mayoral administration...Shanahan makes it possible to answer the immediate and pressing question—why did an agenda of jail reform fail so drastically, producing in the process one of the most notorious penal colonies in the United States?—by asking, and answering, several others...Captives in that sense is more than a history of Rikers: It chronicles the transformations of finance, industry, race relations, and political consciousness that made the jail complex possible in the first place...Shanahan documents the tumultuous second half of the 20th century in New York City—the fading glow of the New Deal; the rise of Black Power and the New Left; the near-total exit of the city's manufacturing capital, and the subsequent capture of the political apparatus by the banking and real estate sector; the imposition of austerity policies following the fiscal crisis of the 1970s—from the standpoint of the city's jails, as well as the people warehoused within and fighting to get out of them."