About

The “Other City” group contends that mapping the history of incarceration in New York City has the potential to steer current debate on reform and abolition as well as serve as a memorial to those who have been impacted by the practice of human caging. By tracing the history of experimental incarceration in New York city, as well as the expansion of the systematic use of prisons and jails, a genealogy of enforcement can be constructed. Furthermore, in researching the stories of those who have been incarcerated in NYC’s penal institutions a ‘History from Below’ research agenda can be developed, unearthing anecdotal and first hand accounts which can demystify the effects of enforcement.

There is a dearth of published scholarship on the history of penitentiaries and jails in New York City, which is extraordinary when you think of the numbers who have been affected by incarceration over the generations.  At its height in the early 1990s 22,000 were imprisoned in the Rikers Island jail complex.  This project began in 2015 following discussions between Jayne Mooney, Sara Salman, Albert de la Tierra, David Brotherton, Susan Opotow and Lou Kontos on how to preserve the memory of those who had been affected by Rikers as well as the need to trace the historical road to the Rikers of today. The project was later joined by Jarrod Shanahan – now at Governors State College, Illinois - who researched NYC’s Department of Corrections from the 1950s for his doctorate in environmental psychology 

This project will follow in the footsteps of the Hudson Valley Prison Public Memory Project, which aims to create public dialogue around the history of the prison in Hudson using a range of data sources, including archival material, oral histories and photographic representation. Through Professor Jayne Mooney, ‘The Other City’ is linked to the NEH funded research ‘Profiles of American Incarceration’ from the early nineteenth century to the present, run by the University of Georgia (Director - Dr Steve Soper, Co-Director Dr. Barry Godfrey, University of Liverpool).  This is working towards the creating of a digital panopticon project for the US, similar to Godfrey’s digital panopticon prison records project in the UK.

The current “Other City” group has largely focused on Rikers and the institutions that directly proceeded it but is now widening out its research to include the ‘Tombs’, the Brooklyn Detention Complex, the Women’s House of Detention, Hart Island, the old Brooklyn Navy Yard jail and the state institutions of Sing Sing and Auburn.