The jail is everywhere: Fighting the new geography of mass incarceration By JackNorton, LydiaPelot‐Hobbs & Judah Schept (Eds.), London: Verso. 2024. 208 pages. $25.95 (paperback). ISBN: 9781804291313

In the foreword to The jail is everywhere, radical geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore references the “place-specific horrors of incarceration,” a useful grounding concept for the ensuing 11 chapters authored by a diverse range of organizers, prison abolitionists, researchers, and artists, all working in their respective communities to fight jail expansion and/or development. With federal and state prison systems and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entering into “per diem revenue” agreements with county sheriffs' departments, the population of Americans incarcerated in county jails is rapidly growing. This edited volume offers a counter-narrative to claims of decarceration and prison closures at federal and state levels, mapping “this new terrain of the carceral state” (p. 17) and both the associated place-specific horrors and place-specific resistance. Although American county jails are also located in mid-size and large cities, special attention is given to the proliferation of rural jails. The jail is everywhere pushes back against the concept that mass incarceration is an urban problem alone; in 2019, jail incarceration in major cities dropped 18% while jail incarceration in rural counties increased 27% (p. 3). In Chapter 1, Jasmine Heiss describes the rural jail boom as a result of “the fallout of a fragmented social safety net, the hollowing out of industry, and a state project that has embraced carceral institutions as the only legitimate manifestation of care” (p. 23). Authors share insights from efforts to prevent rural jail expansion in New York, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and Oregon. In Chapter 10, Sarah Westover and Matt Witt share strategies from organizing against jail development in a rural Republican county, highlighting the need to build broad coalitions based on shared goals. In Chapter 7, Amelia Kirby talks about the need to “cultivate the creation of an abolitionist geography by developing nodes of resistance” (p. 113) in Central Appalachia. These stories offer an inverse of the place-specific horrors of incarceration, demonstrating the power of place-based abolitionist strategies rooted in solidarity and commonalities across rural-urban and partisan divides. The jail is everywhere is full of success stories, like the end of Atlanta City Detention Centre's contract with ICE described by Xochitl Bervera and Wes Ware in Chapter 8. But the carceral system churns on and success is temporal. Although the end of the ICE contract was a hard fought and important victory for Atlanta organizers, the continued campaign to close the jail altogether faced numerous political roadblocks. The jail went from slated for closure in 2019 to leasing 700 beds to neighboring Fulton County Jail in 2022. This is a narrative repeated throughout the edited collection. Still, the fight continues, and each chapter offers key lessons learned and renewed calls to organize and resist the ever-expanding carceral state. Canada does not have county jails; people are incarcerated in either the federal or provincial prison system. Several factors contributing to the high incarceration rates in county jails, such as the cash bail system and the proliferation of rural drug courts, are uniquely American. However, some of the factors contributing to the expansion of county jails mirror Canadian issues. Canadian prison investment is also marked by “carceral humanism,” or the way that jails and other sites of incarceration are strategically recast as needed services to respond to social issues. Carceral humanism that manifests spatially as rural jail and/or prison development is portrayed not just as a “humanist” response to the material deprivation of people who will be incarcerated, but also as a solution to the material deprivation of a community, positioning carceral expansion as an economic boon to struggling, de-industrialized rural areas. Consider the proposed Eastern Ontario Correctional Complex, a brand-new 235-bed facility in the rural community of Kemptville. Descriptions of the proposed prison seem familiar after reading The jail is everywhere, with references to modernized facilities, improved access to programming, and better living conditions, as well as vague gestures to job creation and local community investment. There are also reports of local residents organizing against the proposal alongside prison abolitionists. The use of critique to justify increased carceral capacity transcends jurisdiction, and this volume will be of great interest and use to Canadian organizers and researchers working on issues of prison justice. Importantly, it offers a place-based, local, and rural lens to dialogues on the prison industrial complex, surveillance, policing, carceral humanism, and abolitionist and decarceral futures.

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