The Road to Rikers: A Social History of the Other New York City
Chapter 1: Vagabonds and Idle Beggars - the Colonial City
Chapter Two: “We, the People”: Liberty and Justice for All
Chapter 3: Blackwell’s Island: New York’s Garden of Charity
The opening chapters of Jayne Mooney’s upcoming social history of Rikers Island. Link to PDF
Mooney, J. (2020). The Theoretical Foundations of Criminology. London: Routledge,
To confront the challenges criminologists face today and to satisfactorily critique the theories on which criminology is founded, we need to learn from the past. To do this we must give context to both theorist and theory. Written from a critical perspective, this book brings criminological theory to life. It presents the core theories of criminology as historical and cultural products and theorists as producers of culture located in particular places, writing in specific historical periods and situated in precise intellectual networks and philosophical controversies.
Mooney J, Shanahan J. Rikers Island: The Failure of a “Model” Penitentiary. The Prison Journal. 2020;100(6):687-708.
New York City’s Rikers jail complex is gripped by a crisis of legitimacy. Following a series of investigations, it has been denounced as a major symbol of criminal justice dysfunction, with calls for its closure and replacement with new smaller “state of the art” jails. Yet, when it opened, Rikers was hailed as a “model” facility, at the cutting edge of prison design and prisoner rehabilitation. To elucidate the present situation, we provide a focus on the under-explored history of New York City’s penal institutions.
MOONEY, J. and SHANAHAN, J. (2020), Rikers Island Jail Complex: The Use of Social History to Inform Current Debates on Incarceration in New York City. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 59: 286-304.
Rikers Island is the main jail complex for New York City. At its height in the 1990s, 22,000 people were incarcerated there. Having attracted national and interna- tional condemnation, it is regarded as one of the city’s biggest failures: a magnet for scandal and controversy. In 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged that the complex would be closed within ten years with smaller ‘state of the art’ jails built to replace it. Our research explores the social history of Rikers from its origins to the present day, in a bid to provide a more nuanced understanding of the island and incarceration in New York City, and to engage with ongoing debate on the future of penal reform.
de la Tierra A. Denouncing Racist State Violence: “Fuck the Police!” as Parrhesiastic Exclamation. Critical Issues in Justice and Politics. 2019; 11(1): 28-41.
“Fuck the police!” is explosive, incendiary and divisive. It is a forceful statement that is often interpreted as either affront or galvanizer. Its provocative character, however, obscures its nature and intention making understandings of its motivation and meaning largely absent from its wake. In this paper, I interrogate “Fuck the police!” beyond the supposedly obvious expression of unambiguous rage it announces. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s research on the ancient notion of parrhesia (the practice of courageous truth-telling), I delineate and employ parrhesia as an analytic framework for making sense of this loaded exclamation. Using a case study approach, my reading of “Fuck the police!” suggests it be understood as an abolitionist denunciation of racist state violence. In an era of inflammatory political rhetoric, careful deconstruction of vulgar expressions is of particular interest (and need); especially when emancipatory exclamations risk being confused with arrogant bluster.
Mooney J. A tale of two regicides. European Journal of Criminology. 2014;11(2):228-250.
This paper examines two attempted 18th century cases of regicide: those of Robert François Damiens against Louis XV and Margaret Nicholson against George III, which have similar circumstances yet, on the face of it, strikingly different outcomes. For both assailants were seemingly unremarkable individuals, employed for much of their working lives as domestic servants, the attacks were relatively minor and both were diagnosed as ‘mad’. However, Margaret Nicholson was to be confined for life in Bethlem Royal Hospital for the insane, whereas Robert François Damiens was tortured and torn apart by horses at the Place de Grève. The name of Damiens resonates today amongst scholars of criminology through the utilization of his execution by Michel Foucault in the opening to his seminal work Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975); Margaret Nicholson is less widely known. By analyzing the considerable amount of media and literary coverage devoted to these attempted regicides at the time this paper concludes by locating these crimes as symptomatic of the ‘spirit of the times’.