Book Release: City Time w/ David Campbell & Jarrod Shanahan @ Loyola

Zhandarka Kurti (States of Incarceration, Hard Crackers) hosts a book release event for City Time (NYU Press, 2025), an immersive ethnography of the facilities for sentenced men at Rikers Island, written by former political prisoner David Campbel and Jarrod Shanahan, author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage. From the publisher: "A unique insider perspective of daily life in New York City’s most notorious house of correction While most people behind bars at Rikers Island are detainees awaiting the settlement of their cases, a smaller population have already been convicted and are serving sentences deemed too short for the state prison system. These stints are called “city time.” The sentences range from a few days to a year, and are generally served within large, open dormitories lacking in privacy and sanitation. Within these spaces, incarcerated people reproduce an elaborate set of rules, rituals, and relationships, as a means both of survival and of giving meaning to the time taken from them. Written by David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan, who both served sentences at Rikers, City Time reflects its authors’ personal experiences and observations of short-stay incarceration to present a nuanced and vivid account of a social world kept locked away from the public eye. The authors reconstruct the daily realities of sanitation, nourishment, recreation, work, and other necessary activities, and emphasize the complex interpersonal relationships that emerge in response to city time. Simultaneously, they paint a grim and urgent picture of structural racism, class violence, and the disastrous lack of mental health and substance abuse resources for poor New Yorkers, who are shuttled in and out of city time sentences as “frequent flyers.” Beginning with the authors’ own processes of intake, and ending with the ritual of late-night release, City Time takes readers behind the splashy headlines to depict, in intimately human terms, the rich and variegated social world unfolding, at this very moment, on Rikers Island."