This book about the 20th century history of Cook County Jail is excellent. Newport uses primary sources to analyze how, over time, the jail exacerbated racism and became an institution through which race is made. She covers several topics throughout the book, including the impact of political leaders and policy on the inner-workings of the jail and how people incarcerated in the jail advocated for themselves and used their agency to influence power. She ends the book with a powerful epilogue pointing to the state of the jail during the COVID-19 pandemic and includes a damning analysis of the failures of Sheriff Tom Dart and his office. This book is bold, brave, and very insightful. I would highly recommend it to anybody interested in race, politics, and incarceration.

I never engaged in the text even though I wanted to. Part of this struggle with connection came from getting drowsy at several points while reading but more of it came from the book not knowing what it wanted to do whether it was a straight forward chronology of the Cook County Incarceration system or a study of how certain people were exploited or something else. The eARC formatting also had issues when it included charts. The charts were put into the eARC as lines of text rather than a properly formatted chart.

This book covers an EXTENSIVE history of jails in Chicago, since the 1800s. While this book is focused specifically on jails, I think it falls primarily under History.

This book is perfect for anyone who is a fan of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow who want a more in depth historical view of mass incarceration in America and it’s ties to racism.

I thought this author did an amazing job at researching, especially considering that Cook County Jail told her that they destroy any jail records more than ten years old. I thought the tables showing racial and age make up of the jail throughout the years were really eye-opening.

Anyone who studied criminal theory and sociology will recognize a lot of what was happening in Chicago in the 1950s w/Burgess, Park, Lohman, etc.