Book review: Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement

Abstract

further jailbreaks and riots, and sustained efforts to connect political struggle within the jail to those in the streets of New York and around the world. As a history of New York City narrated through the dizzying expansion of its jail system over the last 70 years, Captives at once draws on and partakes in these disparate traditions of research within and on the jail. Shanahan thoughtfully counterposes the city’s official archives with the literature and testimony of the captives who moved through Rikers to unflinchingly expose the brutality of New York’s jails. However, Captives does not simply condemn the jails on humanitarian grounds. In contrast to those who, horrified by the grim conditions at Rikers, have sought to “improve” carceral infrastructures, Shanahan’s critical appraisal of the material conditions of the jails undermines the reformist position by showing how, for the better part of a century, “reform” has simply meant bigger budgets to lock up more people. Most importantly, though, Captives offers ample material for thinking about the relationship of study and struggle for the diverse activists and organizers steadily gathering under the “abolition” big tent in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd Rebellions. In conversation with the tradition of militant prisoners who learned from inside of the jail to get beyond it, Captives takes its place alongside the archive of prison literature it draws on as a model for the kind of study we must undertake for our present struggle against prisons, policing, and the capitalist order that they uphold.