Jayne Mooney

City University of New York - John Jay College of Criminal Justice | John Jay CUNY · Department of Sociology

Preserving Justice: Historic Texts and the Roots of American Critical Criminology As one of America’s premier institutions for the study of crime and criminal justice, John Jay is the current home of an archive of documents related to the emergence of U.S. critical criminology. This archive includes original syllabi and newsletters from the 1960s Berkeley School of Criminology, rare and out of print texts on the study of crime and delinquency, and correspondence between scholars whom have come to be recognized as trailblazers for the critical paradigm. Jayne Mooney, Associate Professor in Sociology at John Jay and the member elected archivist for the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice, has been entrusted with these and other documents, and is currently preserving them in storage. The Historic Texts project intends to shed light on these materials by making them available to students, researchers, and pedagogues. In Summer 2019 Visiting Scholar, Albert de la Tierra is to collaborate with Jayne Mooney in organizing, cataloguing, and digitizing these documents. In practical terms, this work will involve examining the materials, creating a user-friendly storage system, composing and attaching annotative memos, and digitizing all of the documents with scanners. This work will preserve the archive as well as make it accessible to scholars not affiliated with John Jay as well as those who reside outside of the New York City metro area. In addition to preserving the archive, the Historic Texts project will analyze and present the documents. Albert de la Tierra and Jayne Mooney will select key texts from the archive for exhibition in the Department of Sociology. This exhibit will narrate the emergence of US critical criminology, highlight its intersectional qualities, and discuss its contemporary relevance by displaying original texts with accompanying didactic panels. This exhibit is intended for an undergraduate audience, especially sociology and criminology majors, so the panels will include contextual information about each text and offer suggested readings.

Rikers Island Social History Project The Rikers Social History Project aims to tell the story of the jail complex on Rikers Island. It traces the history of the island itself from the early 1860s when it was used as a training ground for the 20th Colored Regiment and as prisoner of war facility for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, to early debates - and scandals - surrounding prison reform and the penitentiaries of New York City, to forced labor laying the foundation for the earliest penitentiary on the island, through a bold mid-century experiment in progressive penology, which ultimately laid the foundation for Rikers of the present day. Theoretically the project as a whole builds on the debate introduced by E.H. Carr in What is History? (1961) and more recently that of S. Flaaten and P.J. Ystehede (2014) and (Mooney, 2014) about the importance of learning from the past and the need to keep an ‘eye’ on what lessons sociology and criminology can learn from history, as well as the input into history that can be gleaned from the sociology of crime. The project, therefore, situates the history of Rikers Island in terms of its political, social and cultural context. Today the plan to close Rikers Island captures headlines, and the mere mention of its name conjures up arguments about the exponential growth of the prison industrial complex in the age of neo-liberalism. But on Rikers, scandal is nothing new. For over a century Rikers has been a magnet for controversy and political drama, as well as a temporary home to millions of people. The study charts the visually striking geographical expansion of Rikers Island, through the utilization of waste from the city as landfill, alongside its carceral evolution and expansion. It will show how this dual expansion, fueled by utopian dreams of building an ultra-modern institution of medicalized rehabilitation, descended into violence, rebellion, and neglect amid the rise of “law and order” policies and the “War on Drugs”. Rikers will conclude in the immediate present with New York City’s top politicians advocating and planning for Rikers Island to be closed. The intention with Rikers is to fill a gaping void in the scholarship of penal regimes – to say nothing of basic New York City history. As a large penal colony in the midst of one of the great cities of the world, Rikers has the potential to teach scholars, students and the public much about the history of punishment and crime policy in urban America. It is envisaged that this will provide the basis for a much larger study along the lines of the Hudson Valley Prison Public Memory Project, which documents and aims to create a public dialogue around the history of the prison in Hudson using a range of data sources, including archival material, oral histories and photographic representation - (see http://www.prisonpublicmemory.org/hudson-ny/).

In a world order dominated by paradigms of neo-liberal political economy producing social cleavages of historic proportions, citizens and non-citizens have responded with movements and actions designed to rethink social hierarchies and the normative distribution of human and environmental resources. The project brings together faculty and students from diverse disciplines, experiences and backgrounds to provide the physical, social and discursive space in which to articulate, study, and theorize the lived experiences of changes simultaneously affecting both the global north and south.