Jarrod Shanahan

FACULTY  PROFILE Dr. Jarrod Shanahan studies the social history of punishment and control in the United States and collective struggles to build a better world. Dr. Shanahan is the author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage (Verso, 2022), winner of  the 2023 New York City Book Award, and Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reform, and Morbid Symptoms (PM Press, 2025). He is the co-author of States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America's Punishment System (Reaktion/Field Notes, 2022); City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island (NYU Press, 2025); and Skyscraper Jails: The Abolitionist Fight Against Jail Expansion in New York City (Haymarket, 2025). He is an editor of Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity: A Noel Ignatiev Reader (Verso, 2022), and was a founding editor of the journal Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life.  Dr. Shanahan's writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Nation, Social Justice, Race & Class, Prison Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacobin, Vice, Urban Omnibus, New Inquiry, Truthout, Ill Will, End Notes, Inquest, Insurgent Notes, Three-Way Fight, Hellgate, and Gothamist. He also co-authored chapters in the anthologies The George Floyd Uprising (PM Press, 2023) and Three-Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Anti-Fascism (PM Press, 2024).  Dr. Shanahan's research has been featured and reviewed by numerous publications including the New York Times, Times of London, Washington Post, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Nation,  Journal of Urban Affairs, Social Justice, Crime Media Culture, Labor, Public Seminar, Inquest, Vital City, The Metropole, Theoretical Criminology, The Journal of Urban History, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, New York Daily News, and the New York Post.