Melanie Newport is an assistant professor of history at the University of Connecticut. She is author of the forthcoming book, This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration (forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Press). While state and federal prisons like Attica and Alcatraz occupy a central place in the national consciousness, most incarceration in the United States occurs within the walls of local jails. In This Is My Jail, Newport situates the late twentieth-century escalation of mass incarceration in a longer history of racialized, politically repressive jailing.

Part of the Urban History Workshop sponsored by the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History and the History Department.