CITY TIME

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.