David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan’s new book City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island (NYU Press, 2025) offers an insightful look into the daily life of one of the most notorious carceral complexes in the US. Their individual experiences of incarceration are turned into a panoramic view of the minutiae that fill the time claimed from us by the forces of order. I spoke with the authors as a prisoner myself, having been incarcerated in federal prison for actions taken during the George Floyd Uprising of 2020. I am currently still in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in a transitional re-entry program, affording me the opportunity to have this telephone conversation with them, and to elaborate upon the broader implications and context that make a project such as City Time illuminating to our moment of class struggle, from which it was born.
Richard Hunsinger: City Time offers a detailed account of the ways that people live through their sentences on Rikers Island. Though there are details specific to Rikers’ setting and the local specificities of the people locked up there, there are practices common across jails and prisons that show up in y’all’s account.
David Campbell: We’re actually on tour for the book right now; as we speak, we’re driving from Richmond back to New York City. And that’s one of the pieces of feedback we’ve gotten from formerly incarcerated people at pretty much every event we’ve done in the past week.
RH: Right! “We did stuff like that too!” In my case, I recognized a lot of what I went through where I was incarcerated (FCI Forrest City) in what y’all described of life in Rikers. Across the US, there is a common cultural understanding, a social position with its own norms and language, that is informed by how widespread the experience of incarceration is. Its web is only expanding, as state violence becomes more ubiquitous in the daily life of the proletariat, crime panics continue to be propagated, budgets go up for police, and the police become deadlier every year.
Of course, the three of us aren’t the usual set of prisoners, having been there for political actions, choices we made to confront that system directly. We probably share some common experiences here in which we were made aware of the differences of our captures and those of the typical prisoner. Likewise, we are also political prisoners who had light sentences, compared to revolutionaries of the past who made similar decisions and are still taken from us. It is significant that in this conversation we are white people that have different class backgrounds to those we did time with, but have made decisions to align our life outcomes with what incarceration can make of them. I had discussions with friends I made inside about how incarceration was more naturalized for them than it was for me. A general question for us here that I have is how do we relate to this aspect of our involvement in becoming part of the criminalized proletariat?
DC: We’ve talked about this a lot among ourselves and also on the tour so far. My first thought is, the way people get a read on you inside — and I’m sure this was part of your experience as well — it was very clear to people as soon as we showed up there that we were not of the regular demographic of prisoner from over-policed and over-incarcerated populations. This has a lot to do with race: at Rikers, white people are about ten percent of the prisoner population (and those demographics are, interestingly, about the same for the guards). Even beyond that, we’ve talked about how basic physical tells — like having decent teeth, and this is not a joke — were used by other prisoners to judge whether we’d been doing hard drugs before incarceration, etc. The political nature of our cases also set us apart; for me, having a political case was rare, and made me kind of an oddity. It added some spice to a steady stream of guys saying they were in for boosting [professional shoplifting], dealing drugs, illegal handguns, and so forth.
This past week we have talked a lot about how when you come from a more “middle-class” background, have some higher education, and then on paper you are classified as a “violent felon,” as we both are, you defy the expectations people have for people who look and talk like us. So that’s a position I try to claim and inhabit, because it subverts people’s expectations and hopefully broadens people’s understanding of the humanity of not only so-called criminals in general, but also violent felons in particular.
But even having done my time, and feeling a deep solidarity with the criminalized proletariat, I tend to think of myself more as an accomplice, someone who is still outside of the working-class that is comfortable committing crimes and has normalized the idea that people sometimes go to prison. That is not the world I come from, and its not the world I move in. Where I’m at in my life right now, I don’t really want to go back, so I mostly obey the law, I have a decent boring job, and all the rest. I don’t think I’m better than anyone I was locked up with – in fact I made a number of friends inside that I’m still in touch with out here – we just live in different worlds. And it was already clear to all of us while we were incarcerated that felon status and prisoner identity notwithstanding, we’d be going back to different worlds when we got out. We address this sort of “living in a community but not being from it” dichotomy in the intro to City Time, actually, citing the formerly-incarcerated ethnographer Michael Walker who recently published a book called Indefinite about the LA County system.
Jarrod Shanahan: It’s unfortunate that a lot of the writing that gets done about carceral institutions, by people locked up in them, is still done by atypical prisoners. The only book that’s evenly remotely similar to City Time that’s come out of the New York City jail system is called A Modern Purgatory and was published in 1917 by a radical artist named Carlo de Fornaro. He managed to get sentenced to city time in New York for a supposedly libelous publication about the president of Mexico, who pulled some strings and got Fornaro sent to Blackwell’s Island, the city’s penal colony before Rikers. You just need to read him rhapsodizing about the sunset over the East River to get the sense he must have been something of a curiosity in there. There’s also some great writing on the city system by Emma Goldman, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and that most fearless of American revolutionaries, Kuwasi Balagoon, but these are still very atypical prisoners, and some of the best writing in this tradition emphasizes the gulf that political prisoners feel between themselves and most other prisoners. It makes sense; the average person you meet doing a city-time sentence wants to forget about that shit as quickly as possible. They’re not going to be publicizing the fact that they were there; the last thing they want is a book, freely available on an internet search, that identifies them as a person who did time.
In my own case, I wanted to check my own political and ideological predispositions going into this experience. I am an autonomist Marxist, and would absolutely love to go into a place where everyone was working together with a heightened level of class consciousness and understood the institution as their enemy and their fellow prisoners as comrades. I didn’t want that inclination to blind me to the reality of the situation, which is a lot meaner and a lot more complex. So I adopted a very pessimistic view from the jump. I began with the popular prejudice that it was a Hobbesian war of all against all, but very quickly, the vast majority of the people I met subverted that expectation.
RH: People need to understand that the baseline inside, unless you’re in a very intense spot, is that people are very normal.
JS: We all know the problems with this word, but for some reason, nothing says it better!
DC: They’re normal, and they recognize that we’re all in this shitty situation together, and are generally willing to offer you sincere help.
RH: Absolutely. People are understanding of a generally shitty situation. There are norms of cooperation. What clouds that sometimes is that this exists alongside scenes of intense violence, because of the objective situation and the institutional setting, and that is the way some of these norms are enforced. You can be going through the day, step by step, while seeing some wild shit going on right next to you, and know that you personally have nothing to worry about, because you think “I don’t even know what’s going on with that, and I don’t need to find out!”
DC: You just mind your business!
RH: And there is something that’s jarring and traumatizing about that intense kind of dissociation from violence that is also part of the norm, and I think that’s confusing for people.
DC: It’s like living in a rough neighborhood; it doesn’t make you a cold person, you just learn to turn it on and off. And it’s not only that over time, the violence becomes less shocking, but also that, because everything’s so social, you can’t afford to have a strong reaction to every incident, lest you be branded jumpy or something by the other prisoners.
JS: The great Rikers theoretician Lil Wayne talks about this a lot. He tells the story of witnessing somebody attempting suicide, and he says “Wow that guy’s crazy! Anyway, what’s for dinner?” His conclusion is: “Jail desensitizes a lot of things.” This points to the imperative of these places to place limits on your empathy in order to survive. This is common in a variety of lower-class institutions, ranging from homeless shelters to the military, but is also a defining feature of capitalist society in general: unless you have strict ego boundaries, and are able to regulate your empathy, you are not going to be able to survive. You witness things that are traumatic, but you must develop a kind of gallows humor and other coping mechanisms. This is the reason people who live through traumatic events often have to process them much later, because at the time that they occur, it’s necessary to repress the full emotional implications of what you are experiencing. We try to deal with this, in all its complexity, in the book.
DC: Richard, we’re about to drive through the Baltimore tunnel, so if you lose us, we’ll call you right back.
JS: I love this grounding in place.
DC: Where are you, Richard?
RH: I’m in the TV room of my halfway house. There’s nobody here, it’s pretty spacious. I can keep talking, but I’m about to take the trash out.
DC: Works for us! Anyway, we were both recommended the participant-observer method as a way to cope with this environment. This meant that we were trying to systematically reconstruct the society we saw around us on the page, to decode it, make sense of it; to play ethnographer, and take it seriously. That’s ultimately what the book comes from, this coping mechanism by which we put ourselves at a mental distance from what we were seeing, and then we tried to break it down as if we were trying to explain it to a Martian or something, someone with absolutely no cultural context. This dovetailed very nicely with all the advice we received about making it through the initial adjustment phase: mind your business, keep quiet, observe how things work without judgment.
RH: Sorry, I’m a little distracted right now. I’m just waiting for the guard to come down and give me some gloves, so we can go do our thing.
DC: When she gets there, tell her I said she can take her time.
[everyone laughs]
DC: I’m sure she would anyway!
RH: She’s the least bad one around here, so it’s chill.
JS: Getting back to your first question, Richard, how did you think about your experiences in political terms?
RH: I came in with a sense of knowing that it was not going to be, as Jarrod said, some kind of autonomist Marxist dream. I’m a communist, and that’s what I’d tell people on the inside, and it would always lead to interesting conversations. I had prior knowledge I would not be coming into a place with any kind of homogenous or revolutionary political sensibilities. I also knew from jail experiences before to have a general suspicion of others; I’ve been arrested before so I had a sense of jail. I knew to be respectful, keep your head down, mind your business, and you won’t have problems, and I planned to go in with that mentality.
[loud beeping / garbled walkie talkie / woman yelling]
I also knew that you don’t just trust everybody with everything, you don’t always tell them about yourself. Take your time. What I did was just watch and observe, and was measured in my interactions. As much as I might want to be a part of the environment, I understand what y’all were saying about recognizing that distance in how people talked to me immediately. They were like: “What are you doing here?” I’d tell them, and because I was locked up in Arkansas, and I was white, I actually had to clarify so many times that I was not there for January 6th! People just assumed that, and I had to say “No, no, no, the other riots!”
I had reading groups with some guys in there, I got some guys into Marxist theory, especially around Palestine. People would be fascinated with my political positions. I was in during an election year, and when I said “I’m not for either one” that was curious to some people. You have to understand that you aren’t coming from a common ideological perspective, but there’s a common ground you can get to. I also realized that there were choices I made to end up in that position, versus a lot of these guys, where it was really naturalized, it was what they’d come to expect. In my case, there’s a lot of choices that have to be made to maintain that alliance, maintain that belonging while also…
[demonic screeching noises]
DC: Hey man, there’s some kind of background noise and we’re having a hard time hearing you…
RH: It’s probably the wheels on these trash cans… I was saying that it’s important to maintain that class alliance, without falling into full identification with a criminalized position. You know what I mean, people glorifying it and romanticizing it?
DC: Oh, definitely.
JS: That’s a bête noire for me, man. Some of the writing from 2020 makes me cringe, because the authors try to erase the difference between the subcultural left and more proletarian elements of the riots, especially those who looted stores. Rioting is cool but it does not erase a lifetime spent living in very different worlds, to which everyone will almost certainly return when the smoke clears. Some people with lives far removed from the struggles of George Floyd kidded themselves about their connection to the “Black proles” in the streets, and it hurt our collective analysis. I regret not checking this stuff harder in 2020, and I have since heard some utterly laughable slogans like “everyone who riots is Black.” I went to Rikers, effectively for rioting, back in 2014, and let’s just say I have remained decisively white throughout this and other adventures.
RH: That shit makes me so fuckin’ angry. We need to be real. I love the looters! I am all for the looters. But it’s not inherently revolutionary. We need to be cautious. The Marxist / anarchist / communist / whatever position arrives at a distance from a lot of proletarian life, and we are seeking to actively transform these things and not just glorify whatever the proletariat does.
DC: There’s a lot of fucked up shit that proletarians do!
RH: In my life and choices, I have been actively choosing to continually proletarianize myself. I know what direction I need to go in, who I need to be with, and what I need to do, to be struggling with the people I need to struggle with. But this requires having a conscious relationship to the activity. You’re going there to create a specifically revolutionary force, a self-conscious proletariat that is bent upon the negation of its condition, and those coming to it from a different class. We converge in the common need of ending class entirely. I think about the reciprocity of it; there’s a reciprocal transformation going on in that kind of belonging.
JS: It’s necessary to understand the real divisions. One of the books I read at Rikers was W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction, at the behest of Noel Ignatiev, who actually came and visited me there and compared it to US Steel. He said “This is a book that every white radical in America ought to have their nose rubbed in.” It is a masterful political history of the enduring divisions between white workers and black workers, dating back to when the latter were still enslaved, and impressed on me the need to foreground this history, and its endurance into the present, when thinking about race in the United States. This of course was before 2020, when, not to beat a (hopefully) dead horse, a lot of radicals revealed that they do not experience American society as racialized. For my part, I did not experience a second of 2020 as free from the burden of America’s racial division of labor — and I sure as shit didn’t feel that way at Rikers either.
RH: It’s more interesting to look at how people who are not the organic or authentic voices of struggles can transform and become an active part of that struggle. I definitely experienced people I was in with being surprised at things that I did and wanting to learn about it, because it was strange that someone like me was in there. It’s funny you brought up Black Reconstruction because that’s a book I got sent in there and turned other people onto! I met a lot of guys interested in reading Marx, Lenin, DuBois, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney. I’ve spent a lot of time with the classics in the study of racial capitalism, and that resonated a lot with people’s experiences.
The biggest connection we’d have to make was to the labor struggle, it being so distant to many people’s lives when dealing with people who are part of the lumpenized segment of capital’s surplus population. We would get into money, the form of value, and the social relations that are its condition of possibility. It was very easy to get people to grasp that when we’d break it down together and recognize ways that this need of money in order to survive degrades our lives, puts us in places we don’t want to be, doing things we don’t want to do. We never had a formally organized reading group with any structure, but the copies would be read and get around, and we’d all have conversations about them from time to time. We all live in the same box, so your sense of time doesn’t really conform to a set of consistent meetings. The weeks blur together.
JS: I left behind a copy of C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins, I hope it’s still floating around in there.
RH: I’m sure it is! Getting back to the book, the account y’all offer here is particularly attuned to the daily life of this social reality, rather than its theorization. There is something important about the commonality of this experience of losing the time of one’s life to incarceration, the knowledge of the enormity of life-time taken by these institutions. Resistance to this violence is both the most prominent motivation for militancy in our historical moment, as well as the primary means of the repression of this militancy. I notice y’all chose to emphasize the daily tedium of city time, that pervasive boredom that masks the ambient violence of the condition. What do y’all think is at stake in taking this approach to emphasizing the daily humdrum of being locked up?
JS: It’s completely necessary to depict the violence and neglect of incarceration that result in people losing their lives and experiencing great trauma. But this is not the whole story of incarceration. The vast majority of people we met did not experience any great headline-grabbing violence; what they instead suffered were vast stretches of boredom, pointlessness, what we call “enforced stupidity,” in which the most precious thing a person has — the remaining time in their life — is squandered for no reason in a mean, squalid, nasty place. If you’re serious about ending mass incarceration, or incarceration itself, the violence is important to emphasize, but more fundamental to incarceration is the wasting of peoples’ time, and the wasting of their very lives. Of course, locking somebody in a room is itself a violent act, which is why we refer to this as a more banal form of brutality, and exploring this is one of our major objectives in City Time.
When you pull at that thread, it leads to a profound place, because it forces you to confront the fact that our society, as it is presently organized, is premised on the disposability of a significant, racialized fragment of the working class, to such a point where it makes perfect sense to lock people up with nothing to do all day, under circumstances that, as Adorno might say, make you stupider and worse. This is how a critical bloc of the US ruling class has responded to structural unemployment, the specter of racialized class unrest, and the failure of the wage to affect social reproduction for millions of people. We wanted to make the case that boredom behind bars is a political issue, and the fact of our society being structured to exclude people is the root problem. When the question becomes simply one of violence, neglect, and bad jail conditions, you enter a discourse where the problem becomes how to mitigate these hardships and build better facilities — hence the obsession in reform circles with the fabled Northern European prisons. This abstracts from the fact that we are dealing with an institution that ought not to exist at all and functions only to take people’s time away from them. Read Lil Wayne’s Gone ‘Til November! He nails it.
DC: He is our sage on this matter!
JS: #ReadWeezy. Real talk, there’s an activist strategy to discredit prisons and jails by representing them as places filled with people committing violence and extortion against each other….
DC: Sociopaths, people who just can’t exist in our society!
JS: And we’re concerned that this can be self-defeating, because if all that you know about incarceration is that man is wolf to man, why on earth would you want to let anybody out? City Time is an attempt to show a different side of this story; the daily lives of people who are merely bored, listless, and as you said, Richard, shockingly “normal,” who want to talk to you about the new Spiderman movie or your favorite baseball team, and just trying to live a semblance of a normal life in this awful setting. Focusing just on spectacular acts of violence can misrepresent the experience of incarceration for many people.
DC: Especially when these people are demonstrating, day after day, that they do in fact want to live in a society that makes sense and has rules–which they create.
RH: It’s important to show the consistency of incarcerated life and life on the outside. They are not one in the same, but they are necessary conditions of each other. The way people’s time is wasted in incarceration is also a practical, logical consequence of the way people’s lives are wasted in the wage form in capitalist society.
JS: There it is!
RH: This is actually the necessary consequence of wage labor as a common form mediating people’s subsistence. Everybody feels it; if you don’t have a job, you’re close to a set of circumstances that put you on a path to being locked up. It’s good to emphasize the violence of that condition, and the way it asserts itself in all these pervasive boredoms. It’s not just boredom; it’s that you’re having life-time stolen. And your life-time being stolen as part of that transformation of being potential labor time. It’s a necessary consequence of the way that dynamics of capitalist value work: wealth is other people’s time, which has been taken from them, and is as much time as can be possibly taken.
I get very emotional about this, and angry. I feel rage. I feel hatred for it. I just think about how many people I met who had a decade or more of their life taken from them. I met people who’ve been down like 30 years. People don’t realize how violent it is to take someone’s time. You take time from an individual’s life, you’re also taking away time and capacity from people who care about that individual, who need them, who love them. People they could have worked a job to help support may have to work longer, work faster; that’s more surplus labor exploited. You see how this economy of stolen time is woven into the fabric of people’s interdependent social lives.
JS: We’re in an era when these facilities don’t pretend to be anything but naked class violence…
DC: It’s still called “the Department of Correction” and there’s “reintegration” programming and occasional rhetorical nods to the history of progressive penology, but especially since the 1980s, it’s very much shifted to a punishment-oriented model.
JS: Quite openly! Nobody pretends to believe in “rehabilitation” anymore, and there’s not really that much Orwellian doublespeak; most prison systems just say “We’re locking you up because fuck you.”
RH: We’ve been talking about how these places are such naked factories of class violence — and there’s a general awareness among incarcerated people of this fact. There is a general ethos of “fuck 12” — fuck the police — in prison and when dealing with incarceration, but we’ve all described instances of people acting in contradictory ways to that. I often saw people with a general hostility to police, but expressing sentiments of the necessity of the prison as a social institution. Prison is very naturalized, its necessity internalized within even those that are living its violence everyday. I think a lot about the ways in which prison is depoliticized for the people in there, what contributes to that and how we can fight against it, because the only way to overcome these institutions is to make their daily functions and reproduction untenable, and we only do that by making the social antagonism they seek to contain uncontainable.
A determinate direction needs to be given to that kind of movement if it is to move beyond the sporadic outbursts of revolt endemic to class struggle. Communism can appear a hostile proposition to people, as these institutions appear to have the intentional goal of making the experience of communal living a hell that people wish to escape. There is a counterinsurgent and demobilizing aim in this that is consistent with the broader anti-sociality of capitalist relations’ reproduction. As such, the potential power of the lives they build in common to survive escapes them, or they just very often choose to not take the risk of acting on that power. This depends of course on the kinds of facilities, the conditions, the culture, the time people are doing, etc. What did y’all come to make of these varying ways in which people recognized or misrecognized the political horizons of their conditions?
DC: The misrecognition of the conditions that led a person to be locked up is reflected in attitudes like “there’s certain people who need to be locked up, but not me.” I was locked up around the time bail reform went into effect in New York – which entailed a lot of pre-trial detainees being released and, at least in theory, fewer people being held in jail pre-trial from then on – and there was a conversation I witnessed between a DOC captain and a dude who was a total jail and prison guy, very rough around the edges with a long rap sheet, on his umpteenth bid, who had been denied early release because he had a long history of skipping bail, failing to appear for parole, and so forth, and this guy was in total agreement with the DOC captain that as soon as bail reform went into effect, New York was going to be like the notorious 1980s, or the movie The Purge. Here he was, talking about all the bad people who need to be locked up, oblivious to the fact that he himself would be perceived that way at a glance by most people! A “dangerous criminal.” There’s a lot of downright reactionary politics in there, sometimes around issues like immigration and women’s rights, and sometimes just on the prison system.
RH: I remember knowing that Trump was going to win, even from the inside, well before the election, just because of how people were talking about immigration.
DC: In New York, one of the most diverse cities in the country, there’s a lot of immigrants and people from immigrant families locked up, and you still see a lot of xenophobia in Rikers.
JS: It’s the same thing you see on the outside: the disconnect between what people say their politics are, and what their daily behaviors are. At Rikers you meet a lot of people who are saying really foul homophobic shit, meanwhile there’s guys who are visibly queer, and everyone generally just ignores it.
DC: Guys might say things like “Oh, you know the one who’s… kind of funny.” We can’t say “gay” because it wouldn’t be manly to coexist with gay men, but we know what we’re saying.
JS: The flip side of these nasty attitudes are the daily practices people engage in, which are largely cooperative, social, and largely respectful of people’s rights to be their weird selves. It annoys me when middle-class white activists act like they invented mutual aid, because this is simply how most working-class people live. At Rikers there are all kinds of practices of mutual aid and care being practiced by incarcerated people, which we detail extensively in the book, beginning with the process of “social intake,” whereby prisoners help acculturate the new arrival to the setting of the jail and its complex, and often invisible social rules. From there, we find considerable sharing and emotional support, across the lines of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so forth, among people who, if you take them at their word, have a worldview very close to Trumpism. In fact, the first Trump supporter I ever met was a Black dude at Rikers, back in 2016.
So you have this harsh worldview that many people espouse, while participating in complex networks of mutual aid, solidarity, and care. Unfortunately, these practices exist divorced from any sense of their broader political significance, and are seldom mapped onto a liberated future. It’s mostly understood as survival, in the immediate situation. I realize that those of us who sit around imagining a liberated future have a privilege largely unavailable to people concerned with surviving on a day to day basis. But to my mind, that disjunction between what people say they believe politically, and how they’re actually behaving, is both promising and incredibly frustrating. Because this disjunction needs to be bridged, in immediately practical terms, in order to build a liberated society.
RH: There’s a very common prison ethos: “You come to the BOP [Federal Bureau of Prisons] on your own, and you leave on your own.” You do your time, and all that. But there were so many situations where we’d encounter a problem with someone doing their time, because they were doing something that was fucking up everyone’s shit, bringing heat down. You could always point to these things and say, we are all interdependent, cooperative, and require each other in this situation. Nothing happens here without each other.
DC: That’s even true to the point where it’s actually annoying, because everything is so social and so public. There’s a lot of individualist, tough-guy rhetoric, but when it comes time to make collective decisions, like kicking this guy out of the dorm because he’s a problem, or something more involved like a collective action against the institution, a sense of solidarity falls into place quite naturally. We went on strike when I was locked up, due to Covid conditions, and that came together in a matter of moments.The groundwork was being laid, specifically the idea of a strike, for a few days prior, because the underlying issues around the jail administrators ignoring the dangers of Covid were brewing. But when it came time to actually go on strike, it happened pretty spontaneously. And the reason for that was that these people have the experience of collective action, mutual aid, solidarity across the lines of race, ethnicity, gangs, neighborhoods — when they need to. And we recognized the strike as a moment when we could actually flex our power if we relied on that experience
There’s always grumbling that prisoners do all the work, and could shut the place down if they stopped working. That’s the kind of thing that keeps the ghost of a strike going. It’s often just a way of blowing off steam. But when it comes time to put it into action, it can become very real very quickly, and there’s real solidarity and real stakes to it. There were a lot of guys who had been a part of previous actions. One old guy told us he had been at Attica! That kind of memory situates the action not just in the context of cooperation for survival – which is obvious, at least on the practical level, to people who are used to dealing with less – but also in contrast to the lack of control that most people have experienced in their lives. In this context, collective power becomes a real possibility. It reminds you that you have autonomy and real power.
RH: There is the recognition of the sociality of the experience, while also experiencing the ways in which it is a sociality that is directed toward anti-socialization, or de-socialization. That dialectical tension is what makes it so ideologically confusing.
DC: It’s super confusing. I can’t tell you how many times I would have killed to get some privacy, to get away from these fucking people, because my whole sentence was in these giant, noisy dorms. And again, not everybody has revolutionary politics, to say the least. But when it came time to close ranks to shut down the institution, it was so fucking satisfying.
RH: It feels like there’s a counterinsurgent, de-mobilizing intention to the organization of the institution, where you make most people’s experience of communal living a hell that they want to escape from, and this creates an intuitive hostility to notions of communism.
DC: Totally! I’ve been in and out of different spaces and scenes that have collective living, or sharing your life with other people as an ideal, and I had this sort of idea in the back of my mind before I went away: “Maybe some time in my life I want to live on a commune!” And I just completely don’t have that anymore since jail. Guess I got it out of my system. An enforced commune! Actually, maybe the “jail is a commune” argument could bring the right over to abolitionism…
JS: Again, in a lot of ways it mirrors transformations on the outside, where most spaces for public assembly or sociality that don’t serve a direct profit-generating function have been eliminated, and public services have been made deliberately nasty and unpleasant to lower their popularity. The closest thing I have experienced to city time since I got out is riding the train in Chicago, where public transit has been defunded and has largely absorbed the role of a rolling homeless shelter. I ride the train with my baby and dudes are hot boxing every car with cigarettes, weed, even crack and shit like that, pissing right there in the train, and all the rest, and I don’t think the neo-liberal elites in Chicago have any problem with this. And why would they? By this point, just about anybody with the money to buy a car doesn’t use Chicago transit, and if these services were to get dramatically cut, who is going to care? What would be left to defend? Automobile culture is an antisocial death cult that turns ordinary people into homicidal maniacs and is literally pushing the planet to the point of extinction, but when most Americans think of public transit they imagine this kind of scene.
RH: Which leads to another contradiction. The ways that people endure the stolen life-time of incarceration produces a set of practices that are both opposed to institutional rules, and end up reproducing the institution through making this condition of loss bearable. We see this in the permissive attitude that guards take to certain things, the selective application of disciplinary action. Prisons and jails become havens of drug abuse and violence that the guards themselves continually aid and abet, sometimes as direct conspirators in those operations, sometimes more passively because they know they can leave the inmates to the task of maintaining the balance. But there is also the general recognition amongst prisoners that the relative autonomy of their social life behind bars means that they run that show, if they chose to act on that power. What the carceral institutions of the capitalist state necessarily must create to produce a proletarianized pool of potential labor-power for exploitation also must contain the immanent means for the liberation of life-time. It is in line with points we’ve raised above, but I wonder what y’all’s thoughts are on how this potential can be harnessed towards a revolutionary communist project? How are the practices that we develop to sustain ourselves and each other within and against the stolen life-time of incarceration creating the means of an emancipatory political project?
JS: A former political prisoner I respect immensely recently asked us how we relate to the rules and de facto order of prisoner life discussed in the book, in light of our anti-authoritarian politics. It made me realize that, in our talks, we have been largely emphasizing the pro-social aspects of city time, because this dimension is so absent from the popular culture representation of incarceration. But — and I don’t think we shy away from this in the book — it’s equally true that this social order largely functions to keep the institution running smoothly, in explicit cooperation with the guards — to say nothing of a handful of gang leaders who function as a kind of ruling class, often with no qualms about hoarding resources or relishing in petty markers of status to the detriment of others, like hogging otherwise-unused payphones. I think David’s experience of the strike at Rikers helps point to a way out. And he is being a bit modest; this was a historic action, and resulted in the release of roughly 1,200 prisoners at the height of Covid. His essay “Stick-up on Rikers Island,” which he wrote while still inside documenting the strike, is one of my favorite pieces of political writing, full stop, and not just because I had the honor of excitedly typing up the handwritten draft and publishing it on May Day! David, do you care to take us home on this question?
DC: I think it’s important to note that the strike we’re talking about arose first in a dorm that had no rigid power structure, gang-affiliated or otherwise. As of very recently, just a couple days before the strike, it had gone from being a “gang house” to a “neutral house” when all but one of the gang members were transferred to other housing units by the institution. What’s more, about half the dorm’s population was a group of men who had just appeared over the past 48 hours as the institution transferred them in, en masse. There was a lot of transferring going on at this time, first because the city had voted to close Rikers and attempts were being made to close one building at a time, which meant moving their populations into other housing units, and then of course they started moving people around as COVID was taking off.
So it was a very chaotic time, even more chaotic than the normal Rikers environment with its high turnover, etc. And these were people who did not know each other well, there was some animosity toward the new arrivals as a bloc, there was no real decision-making structure in the housing unit – and yet, we were able to hash out, non-hierarchically, by consensus, what actions we were going to take to stand up for ourselves against the institution, implement those actions, stick to them, and adapt as needed. It wasn’t all non-hierarchical: to my understanding, the dorm across the hall, which also went on strike, was basically ordered to by the gang leadership there. But the combination of this spontaneous sense of heightened solidarity along with direct democracy was extremely effective at building prisoner power. It seized on the enforced collectivity and turned it against the institution.
And these more democratic means of making decisions among the prisoners on Rikers are far from unheard-of. We also organized our entire dorm into cleaning crews with defined shifts via consensus a few days before the strike. Later, when a prisoner who had been in isolation with COVID appeared at the dorm’s gate late at night, as the DOC tried to transfer him back into the dorm, the rest of us took a vote as to whether to let him in or not. And I heard a fair amount of talk about the practice of prisoners sometimes electing a “mayor” in “neutral houses” without a rigid hierarchy. So the prisoner-created and -enforced social rules generally serve to help give reality a sense of order and maintain that order, but these social rules can also kind of shift to create and maintain a liberatory force. In those cases, the rule to show solidarity with other prisoners, which is generally pretty high but isn’t number one, essentially jumps to the rule number one spot.
RH: The looming threat of a strike is always strong. It is a powerful tool, a thought that keeps people alive and waiting for another chance to mobilize. I know that in Forrest City there was an incident referenced often that some years back they had all refused trays in the chow hall, though the reasons changed in different tellings. There were no shortage of reasons to take action. Our conditions were abysmal and unsanitary, the water contaminated with calcium, the food terrible and not enough, the recreation yard would be closed for months at a time, people would be denied medical care they needed, etc.
Towards the end of my bid, there was word spreading of strike actions being taken across a few camp and low-security compounds in the Southeast, most notably the one at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Applications of First Step Act credits for early release had been being done incorrectly since the act’s passage, and people had been being held longer inside than they were supposed to be. Once those strikes took off and people took wildcat action, the BOP scrambled to recalculate people’s times, and we started seeing people go home very quickly.
Moments like that can make us realize just how delicate these institutions are in the face of a mass threat. And the carceral institution’s manner of taking life-time en masse continually creates the means of concentrating this social force, and continually gives it reason to fight back for that life that it needs. I think often about how our political horizon right now is hampered by the fixations on a nationalist political horizon, and how we can see this reflected in forms of autonomous actions by prisoners. The way we spoke of asserting our control of the prison by ejecting people that caused problems in our units, for example. It shows we both run things, but we also do so in a way that reproduces the smooth functioning of the institution. In that trap is a microcosm of the prison of American nationalism that must be destroyed, a boundary that must be crossed in order to transform autonomous self-activity into emancipatory praxis. Any moment of resistance has to be critically interrogated from within, pushed against the current of its stabilized return to the conditions in which it originated. The contemporary moment appears to offer us an avenue into the unification of an internationalist and revolutionary proletarian labor movement and the abolitionist struggle through the further militarization of the Border regime and ICE.
The continuity across Democrats and Republicans in this regard is something that I hope becomes politically clarifying to militants, and allows us to see that there is no American fix to the hell of incarceration. Our collective freedom will bring about the dissolution of “the American worker” as a coherent subject. The Palestinian liberation struggle also shows us the connection of the resistance within prisons to a broader political program, and one that is part of a necessarily internationalist, anti-imperialist project. The struggle in each particular moment of resistance needs to be consciously made into an actualization of the universal liberation that it realizes, that real movement of communism that erodes and breaks through all borders and walls.
DC & JS: Hell yeah!
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Richard Hunsinger is a communist and formerly incarcerated political prisoner for actions during the George Floyd Uprising. In their free time they write developments of Marxist theory on the primacy of the class struggle and regimes of labor exploitation to the questions of race and class, nationalism, imperialism, crisis theory, and the debates on the historical transition to capitalism. Their work can be found at richardhunsinger.substack.com.
David Campbell is a writer, translator, and former antifascist political prisoner. He is the co-author of City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island (NYU Press, 2025), was a PEN America 2021 Writing for Justice Fellowship finalist, and his writing has been featured in numerous publications, including Slate, Huffington Post, CUNY Law Review, New York Focus, Truthout, and the Appeal. He is the translator of Revolutionary Affinities: Toward a Marxist-Anarchist Solidarity.
Jarrod Shanahan is the author of Captives (Verso, 2022) and Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help (PM Press, 2025); coauthor of States of Incarceration (Field Notes/Reaktion, 2022), City Time (NYU Press, 2025), and Skyscraper Jails (Haymarket, 2025); and editor of Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity (Verso, 2022). He works as an assistant professor of criminal justice at Governors State University.