The Jail, the Police, and the People’s Chinatown

<p>This zine takes the building of a megajail in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and the outcry around it, as a crossroads where disparate histories of displacement, carceral reform, police violence, community investments, and the people’s resistance converge — prompting old questions and new visions. Under the city’s 2019 borough-based jails plan, the megajail in Chinatown, along with three other jails in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, have become the city’s newest chapter in failed carceral reform — an expensive and enduring tradition of replacing “bad” jails with better ones, which in short time become “bad” jails, and so on. This zine takes the city’s vision of a more “humane” jail to task, alongside hate crime legislation, policing, gentrification, and the betrayal of our cultural institutions. It offers alternative visions grounded in decades of Black abolitionist organizing and popular resistance in Chinatown, asking: what power would it take to determine the future on our own terms?</p>