Speaker Series: Zhandarka Kurti and Jarrod Shanahan
In 2019, after unyielding pressure from activists, New York City seemed poised to close the detested Rikers Island penal colony. The local press dutifully reported that the end of Rikers was imminent, and New Yorkers celebrated the closure of the country’s largest urban jail, condemned as a moral stain on an otherwise great city. The problem, however, was that the city had not actually committed to closing Rikers. And at the same time, it laid the groundwork for the construction of more jails, a network of skyscraper facilities amounting to the largest carceral construction the city has seen in decades.
How did this happen? Scholars and organizers Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti detail how progressive forces in New York City appropriated the rhetoric of social movements and social justice to promise “downsized” and “humane” jails. The principal advocates of these new jails were not right-wing politicians, but prominent city activists and progressive non-profit organizations. The story is at once a case study and a cautionary tale for what will be coming to cities and towns across the United States and beyond.
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Dr. Zhandarka Kurti is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Kurti received her PhD degree in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research and teaching areas include race and criminalization, mass supervision and contemporary politics of criminal justice reforms. She is the co-author of Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City (Haymarket 2025), and States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform and the Future of America’s Punishment System (Field Notes/Reaktion 2022).
Dr. Jarrod Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso, 2022) and Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms (PM Press, 2025), and the co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform and America’s Punishment System (Field Notes/Reaktion, 2022), City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island (NYU Press, 2025) and Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City (Haymarket, 2025). He works as an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University.