Speaker Series: Zhandarka Kurti

Since 2011, New York City has become a laboratory of criminal justice reforms that are reconfiguring mass incarceration. These reform efforts include the closure of 24 state prisons and 26 juvenile detention centers, raising the age a child can be prosecuted as an adult to 18 years, ending stop-and-frisk and most recently, a plan to close the Rikers Island jail complex. In recent years, Rikers Island has become the most visible symbol of race and class violence at the heart of mass incarceration. Responding to activist energy and public demand to close Rikers, a nexus of criminal justice reformers, politicians and progressive nonprofits came together to replace the notorious jail with costlier carceral facilities. This presentation will draw from a new co-authored book with my colleague Jarrod Shanahan where we explore how these progressive forces in New York City appropriated the rhetoric of social movements and social justice to promise “downsized” and “humane” skyscraper jails. Focusing on the political coalition that campaigned for these new jails sheds light on the vision of carceral humanism, an emerging ethos that is reconfiguring mass incarceration amid growing austerity and inequality.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

Zhandarka Kurti (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Kurti received her Ph.D. degree in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research explores race, class, gender and criminalization, probation and mass supervision and contemporary politics of criminal justice reforms. 

Her research and teaching are informed by an interdisciplinary approach that brings together critical scholarship on policing, prisons and social control to place criminal justice system transformations within the wider socio-historical, economic and political forces that shape American life. 

Before coming to Loyola, Dr. Kurti was an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2019-2021). She was also a postdoctoral fellow at New York University’s Prison Education Program where she taught sociology courses to incarcerated students at Wallkill Correctional Facility.