City Time

Starred review from October 7, 2024
Campbell, who spent a year at Rikers Island after being convicted of “brawling” at an antifascist protest in 2018, and Shanahan (Captives), who spent 30 days at Rikers after being arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2016, provide a riveting portrayal of everyday life at the prison. The authors depict Rikers as a world unto itself that blurs time and diminishes inmates’ humanity: the food is deplorable, privacy is impossible, the clothing never fits, and random searches result in the loss of hard-won personal items. Decisions made by correction officers—when not exhibiting a “violent compulsion”—are frequently arbitrary, as they attempt to balance tight control with a flexibility that forestalls rebellion. Such innumerable but unpredictably applied rules make simply maintaining order and dignity the full-time preoccupation of prison life, according to the authors; inmates self-organize to regulate shower use and telephone access, and to compel guards to remove disruptive inmates. The authors’ unhurried cataloging of seemingly endless quotidian deprivations fascinates (“It is easy to forget how often fingernails... must be cut, until one is deprived of the means to clip them.... Most inmates’ nails remained... talon-like, which made a common side effect of fistfights. A frustrated neighbor once gestured to his fingernails, remarking to Jarrod, ‘Why don’t they want to confiscate these dangerous weapons?’ ”). Readers will be rapt.

December 1, 2024
Engrossing, intimate account of "city time," short-term sentences served within New York's notorious Rikers Island. Co-authors Campbell and Shanahan term this work a "participant-observer ethnography," noting they "experienced city time both as scholars studying it and as inmates." They explain, "We were both arrested for protest activity and were locked up begrudgingly." Thus, this immersive portrait acknowledges the authors' relative privilege while exploring how such short sentences entrap many working-poor, addicted, or mentally struggling individuals in a pointless retributive cycle. Though some academic synthesis is present, the book is structured around "its authors' personal experiences and observations of city time, organized as systematically as possible." These aspects include not only the physically oppressive environment and endless bureaucracy and rules, but also the "social intake" provided by fellow inmates, a kind of protective institutional memory; both authors learned, and document, that "a complex and often ad hoc inmate code structures social life in countless ways." Though prisoners' relationships with the working-class corrections officers are equally complex, they find that "the COs inhabit a malicious, predatory, and dysfunctional social world." Otherwise, they effectively reveal the daily grind of dormitory life, diversions of work and commissary visits, and the dire mental health care situation. Throughout, their goal is clearly to contrast the resilience of prisoners with "not just the brutality of city time but the banality, stupidity, and waste that characterize every second of it." Noting that "the onset of COVID-19 caused considerable disruption in whatever normalcy could be said to define city time," one author describes participating in an inmate strike for better pandemic responses that demonstrated surprising cohesion. The pair are deft and balanced collaborators, writing with academic rigor, as well as humor and compassion. A literal insider's view of the troubling social warehousing function of mass incarceration.

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