Cars and Jails

Drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated men and women, Cars and Jails examines how the costs of car ownership and use are entangled with the prison system. American consumer lore has long held the automobile to be a "freedom machine," consecrating the mobility of a free people. Yet, paradoxically, the car also functions at the cross-roads of two great systems of unfreedom and immobility-- the American debt economy and the carceral state. Cars and Jails investigates this paradox in detail, showing how auto debt, traffic fines and fees, over-policing, and automated surveillance systems work in tandem to entrap and criminalize poor people. Malcolm X, a former auto worker, once observed that "racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new model every year." But he could hardly have foreseen how cars themselves would become such an efficient vehicle for delivering Black and brown people into the arms of the carceral system. This book describes how racialization and poverty take their toll on populations with no alternative, in an autocentric country, but to take out loans in order to drive, while exposing themselves to predatory policing. Looking ahead to the frothy promises of the "mobility revolution," Cars and Jails concludes with a number of prescriptions for the overhaul of transportation. In recent years, there have been several books published on the growth of mass incarceration and racialized policing. So, too, the literature on financialization and debt has been growing. None of these books places the car at the center of these developments in order to connect the debt and carceral systems as they work together in daily life.