She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration, and reported the following:
Toward the end of the chapter where page 99 falls, I’ve assessed the symbolic power of rehabilitated Black prisoners and the anti-corruption visions of white liberals in the political construction of jails as “model detention camps.” In this section about the role of comedian Dick Gregory in raising the profile of civil rights struggles in Chicago’s House of Correction, page 99 includes the somewhat successful campaign by Black corrections officers to get a racist warden fired, in part because they were being blocked from promotions. The outcome is a bit of a mixed bag, because a white corrections officer was promoted to be the new warden while a Black CO was made number 2 in command, which largely proved the point the Black corrections officers were making about the limits they faced for pay raises and power in the institution.Visit Melanie Newport's website.
Page 99 provides an accurate sense of the book in that takes the reader into the thickets of local politics that are driving jail reform. Page 99 hits right in the middle of the book, as the Civil Rights Movement was making its mark on the Chicago House of Correction and Cook County Jail in the 1960s. By this point in the story, jails in Chicago have been operating for 130 years as racialized institutions essential to political repression and class warfare. Over time, the major question of jailing in Chicago had changed from “should we have jails?” to “what kind of jails should we have?”
For people incarcerated and working in jails, the matter of how to deal with jails as an inevitable presence in urban life was informed by a new demographic reality: by the 1960s, both the city and county jails were predominantly Black institutions. Policymakers advocated for jailing because they believed they were good for society. Racial ideologies about the benefits of jailing were starting to extend to the Black workers who were becoming responsible for jailing their neighbors and community members.
However, where page 99 departs from the rest of the book is that it is one of the rare spots where I had a clear sense of how workers were intervening in local jail politics. The archive around labor organizing in Chicago’s jails is thin, and part of why I loved getting to tell the story of the guard activism at the Chicago House of Correction is that they were explicit about how they saw themselves as civil service professionals worthy of dignity and respect from both jail bosses and the city politicians working to undermine civil rights protests.
While the activities and sympathies of jail corrections officers in Chicago today are largely hidden, page 99 of my book shows that their politics and history are more complicated than shown by simple narratives of conservative or punitive political ascendence. Complicating every assumption we have about the rise of mass incarceration is the goal of the book, so in that sense, the Page 99 Test works.
--Marshal Zeringue
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