The New Jail

Profit and Social Control

Dan Gilbert’s deal to build a new detention center for Wayne County in exchange for prime real estate is not merely his latest attempt to conceal his downtown annexation project under the pall of benevolent progress. Rather, the project, which falls under Gilbert’s Rock Ventures banner, signals a material and rhetorical expansion of racialized redevelop ment in Detroit. In the words of prison studies, the recent land swap articulates a “carceral space” in which public and private agencies surveil, police, criminalize, imprison, penalize, and otherwise exclude people of color
in order to protect white property.

Published in Riverwise Magazine from the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center.