Norton, J, Pelot-Hobbs, J. & Schept, J. (Eds.) (2024). The Jail is everywhere: Fighting the new geography of mass incarceration. Verso.

Reviewed by: Liam Gillespie, University of Melbourne

The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration is a crucial anthology skilfully assembled by editors Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept. The foreword, written by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, opens with the observation that “It’s difficult to fight an adversary that keeps changing shape” (2024, p. vii). With this in mind, the collection seeks to address the evolving challenges posed not only by the prison industrial complex, but by the expansion of the jail and the carceral logics that underpin it.

To respond to this shapeshifting violence, each contributor to the volume—many of them activists and organisers—focus on a key aspect of the carceral geography of racial capitalism in the United States. They work to contour and critique the expansion of jails in the United States by mapping the ideological, material, and political economies that underpin jails and their deployment. This is crucial work, because, as The Jail Is Everywhere illustrates, while the tactics, contingencies, and geographies of carcerality have changed, so too have the ends to which the state has increasingly implemented local county jails (p.2). Indeed, as Jasmine Heiss explains in Chapter 1, one of the perverse ways the state has adapted to the success of activists and organisers in limiting the building of new prisons, has been an increased reliance on smaller, rural county jails (p. 22). Moreover, because local counties often receive per diem rates from government per person they hold, local counties and sheriffs now often compete to house more and more individuals, regardless of whether they are sentenced to imprisonment; held on remand; or awaiting deportation or citizenship outcomes. As the volume painstakingly illustrates, this has led to greater overall rates of incarceration, spread more thinly across expansive geographies. This leads Norton, Pelot-Hobbs and Schept to conclude that “carceral devolution” has come to function in the present day as “a geographic form of state restructuring that concentrates resources into sheriffs’ offices” (p. 11).

Each chapter of the volume contributes to our understanding of the plethora of ways that jails function as an efficient (and perhaps ultimate) mode of extraction that works to convert the time of the incarcerated—and that of their families and communities—into commodity form. By examining a range of carceral geographies and jail processes across the United States, the contributors to this volume illustrate how this process of extraction and conversion can lead to the realisation of commodity in innumerable forms: be it that of wages, debt, services, rent, utility bills, vendor invoices, political capital for re-election, and more. By tracing these processes, The Jail Is Everywhere demonstrates how this ‘value’ is ultimately siphoned and funnelled from those made vulnerable so that it can be concentrated in the hands of a few. This creates and exacerbates what Gilmore calls “group-differentiated vulnerability to pre-mature death” (p. x).

In tracing these many intricacies, the volume’s chapters are thematically connected through a shared effort to challenge not only the expansion of jails, but so too, the pervasive notion of “carceral humanism”. As Norton, Pelot-Hobbs, Schept explain, this notion functions as an overarching narrative that (purports) to justify “massive carceral growth” through “the language of human rights, therapeutic justice, and reform” (p. 5). To this end, the volume “[offers] crucial and expansive insight into the different ways that carceral humanism manifests in different geographies and political contexts” (p.7). As Liz Blum reminds us in Chapter 4, the volume also works to highlight the way the state attempts to combat anti-carceral efforts by appealing to carceral humanism, such as by incorporating services for mental health, gender, disability, and education—among others—into its carceral institutions as a means of ‘softening’ and ‘humanising’ them (p. 71).

In reflecting on state efforts to expand and justify jails, the volume provides activists and organisers with strategies to overcome the state’s deployment of the ostensible ‘common sense’ of carcerality: the notion, as Gilmore reminds us, that “crime is the problem for which carcerality is the solution” (p. viii). The Jail is Everywhere deploys a variety of mechanisms to show how this dictum “works ideologically to displace curiosity and attention by presenting a self-evident and self-realizing social project” (p. viii). The volume challenges this presumed self-evidence by reinvigorating the reader’s curiosity, demonstrating how activists and organisers have challenged carceral logics and carceral expansion across the United States—including in California, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and more. In mapping these carceral geographies, and demonstrating their ideological, material, and political links, the volume provides concrete strategies and tactics that like-minded activists and organisers could pick up and/or reiterate in their own contexts. Among these are included strategies for organising, building, recruiting, and structuring organisations. For example, in Chapter 6, Dawn Harrington and Gicola Lane refer to their work with the Free Hearts community organisation to elucidate strategies for organising participatory defense for those facing charges. The volume also provides many strategies for subverting existing carceral processes and logics from within. For example, in Chapter 4, Blum articulates some of the strategies implemented by the Decarcerate Sacramento coalition, which included combatting jail expansion by turning the state’s own economic logic against it, whereby the coalition exposed the fact that jail expansion “would lock the county into the ongoing fiscal cost of operating the jail” (p. 63), resulting in net loss. Similarly, Blum illustrates how organisers can work with lawyers to “shift the way the law is used to confront the use of incarceration”, while also avoiding “unintended impacts of conditions litigation” (p. 75).

In the concluding chapter of the volume, editors Norton, Pelot-Hobbs and Schept bring together many of the strategies and tactics covered in the volume. These strategies and tactics are each elaborated for the reader, and organised thematically under the following sub-headings:

Jail fights are fights over planning and development.
Anti-jail fights require ideological struggle.
Anti-jail struggles are iterative and long-haul.
Anti-jail strategy requires study of geographical and political context.

In reflecting on these strategies and tactics, and indeed the volume as a whole, Gilmore observes, with a sense of hope, that “the place-specific horrors of incarceration are also pathways to uprising as well as organising” (p. viii). To this end, The Jail Is Everywhere is a vibrant collection that equips the reader, and anyone interested in organising against the many forms of carceral expansion, with a swathe of helpful strategies and tactics. This is vital, because as Gilmore concludes: “A luta continua” (p. xii). The struggle continues.