Jack Norton with Ruth Wilson Gilmore: The Jail is Everywhere

​Writer Jack Norton joins us to discuss his book The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration with Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

This event will take place in person at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on the 7th Floor.

Nearly every county and major city in the United States has a jail, the short-term detention center controlled by local sheriffs that funnels people into prisons and long-term incarceration. Jails are now the fastest-growing sector of the US carceral state. As jails grow, they transform the region around them. Whole towns and small cities see health care provision and employment opportunities become subordinate to carceral concerns.

If jails are everywhere, resistance is too. Campaigns against new or expanded jails have emerged in large and mid-sized cities and in dozens of small towns and rural counties across the US. While there is some coordination and communication between those involved in these struggles, they tend to be isolated from each other and from broader movements. The Jail Is Everywhere brings together an incredible range of knowledge and experience from jail fights across the country. It maps this new terrain, foregrounding the hard-forged analyses of anti-jail organizers themselves as they take us through campaigns that, while appearing local, are at the new center of the carceral state.

At this event, Jack Norton will discuss his book and more with the book's forward writer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 

To join the event in person | Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jack Norton is a writer, researcher, and photographer who studies incarceration and development. He is an Assistant Professor at Governors State University in the Chicago Southland, and is co-editor of The Jail Is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso, 2024).

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A co-founder of many grassroots organizations including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore works on racial capitalism; organized violence; organized abandonment; and abolition as a green, red, and internationalist project of liberation. Author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press 2007), she recently published a new introduction to Lenin’s Imperialism and The National Question (Verso 2024). With Paul Gilroy she co-edited Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference. (Duke 2021). Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition is forthcoming from Haymarket. Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Her internationalist work is featured in the Antipode Foundation documentary Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Dir Kenton Card, 2020). Honors include the Ralph Santiago Abascal Prize in Economic and Environmental Justice (2003); the Southern California Library Lifetime Achievement Award (2007); A New Way of Life Re-entry Project Lifetime Achievement Award (2010); the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Award (2020); and the Marguerite Casey Foundation 2022 Freedom Scholar. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

GET THE BOOK

• Borrow: NYPL Catalog


• E-Book app: SimplyE, available on iOS and Android

Don't have a New York Public Library card? Get one here!

ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

In-Person

• Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue.


• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.


• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

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All programs are subject to change or cancellation. 

The 7 Stories Up Series at SNFL is made possible by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).