Cars and Jails: Free­dom Dreams, Debt and Carcer­al­i­ty by Julie Liv­ingston and Andrew Ross, New York: OR Books, 2022, pp. 200

Book review by Ted Schrecker

My col­league Clare Bam­bra and I began the chap­ter on work and inse­cu­ri­ty in our book on “neolib­er­al epi­demics” (Schreck­er and Bam­bra, 2015) with the sto­ry of a young New Jer­sey woman who died one morn­ing in 2014 as she slept in her 13-year-old car. Ms. Fer­nan­des often slept in the car while shut­tling between her three, low-wage jobs in food ser­vice; she kept a can of gaso­line in the car because she some­times left the engine run­ning and was wor­ried about run­ning out of gaso­line. Appar­ent­ly, the can acci­den­tal­ly tipped over and the vapours from spilled gaso­line end­ed her life (Swarns, 2014).

Driving while Black

We were con­cerned main­ly with the spread of pre­car­i­ous employ­ment, often involv­ing mul­ti­ple jobs, among the grow­ing ranks of the work­ing poor. How­ev­er, the sto­ry also fore­grounds the indis­pens­abil­i­ty of auto­mo­biles in the lives even of peo­ple for whom the cost of buy­ing and main­tain­ing them is a con­stant wor­ry. In Cars and Jails, New York-based pro­fes­sors of Social and Cul­tur­al Analy­sis Julie Liv­ingston and Andrew Ross build on this theme, dev­as­tat­ing­ly under­min­ing the mythol­o­gy of auto­mo­biles as “free­dom machines” and fore­ground­ing the irony of tropes like the Buick "Free Spir­it" (Fig­ure 1, below). The book expos­es the grim con­trast between images of free­dom and the real­i­ty of a soci­ety in which decay­ing or non-exis­tent pub­lic trans­port cre­ates auto-neces­si­ty that drags work­ing peo­ple deep­er into debt and, espe­cial­ly for peo­ple of colour, expos­es them to the haz­ards of pre­tex­tu­al police traf­fic stops for “dri­ving while Black”. Although the book focus­es on the Unit­ed States (US) with its vicious com­bi­na­tion of his­tor­i­cal racism and con­tem­po­rary mil­i­ta­rized polic­ing (Balko, 2021), the analy­sis has much broad­er appli­ca­tion in a world where the risks asso­ci­at­ed with dif­fer­en­tial access to mobil­i­ty are both dri­vers and man­i­fes­ta­tions of increas­ing inequality.

Liv­ingston and Ross begin from the premise that “[f]or most of us, dri­ving a car is non-option­al” in North Amer­i­ca out­side a lim­it­ed num­ber of met­ro­pol­i­tan areas with exten­sive pub­lic trans­port. This sit­u­a­tion itself is not a fact of nature, but an out­come of decades of pol­i­cy choic­es that involved, in the US, the retrench­ment of exist­ing tran­sit sys­tems with the active sup­port of the auto­mo­tive indus­try and the con­struc­tion of the fed­er­al­ly fund­ed inter­state high­way sys­tem. In addi­tion to pro­vid­ing infra­struc­ture that low­ered the cost of sub­ur­ban­iza­tion and facil­i­tat­ed “white flight” from the cities, the inter­state sys­tem often destroyed or iso­lat­ed estab­lished Black urban areas, thus con­tin­u­ing the his­tor­i­cal lega­cy of ‘redlin­ing’ by lend­ing agen­cies and cast­ing racial­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry set­tle­ment pat­terns in con­crete. The pat­tern con­tin­ues with (for exam­ple) the bil­lion­aire Koch fam­i­ly financ­ing cam­paigns oppos­ing the expan­sion or revi­tal­iza­tion of urban transit.

Legal disabilities

The par­tic­u­lar focus of Livingston's and Ross’s pio­neer­ing trans­dis­ci­pli­nary work is how the Unit­ed States’ auto-cen­tred social fab­ric affects peo­ple, in par­tic­u­lar mem­bers of racial­ized pop­u­la­tions, who have been incar­cer­at­ed. The back­ground is a ver­tig­i­nous rise in incar­cer­a­tion rates start­ing in the 1970s, part­ly asso­ci­at­ed with an increas­ing­ly aggres­sive, vio­lent, and law­less war on drugs. The US impris­ons pro­por­tion­al­ly far more of its cit­i­zens than any oth­er for­mal democ­ra­cy, with sev­er­al mil­lion peo­ple either incar­cer­at­ed or under “penal super­vi­sion” (pro­ba­tion or parole), and Black men impris­oned at six times the rate of white men. Pri­ma­ry data come from inter­views with for­mer­ly incar­cer­at­ed peo­ple in greater New York City and urban Indi­ana, car­ried out as part of the work of the New York Uni­ver­si­ty Prison Edu­ca­tion Pro­gram Research Lab. A dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of the Lab is that par­tic­i­pat­ing stu­dents work as “peer researchers” and thus co-pro­duc­ers. The rich­ness of the con­text and coun­ter­point the authors pro­vide will come as no sur­prise to read­ers famil­iar with their pre­vi­ous work. Their method­ol­o­gy and nar­ra­tive style here give voice to a population–in the US, a very large population–often silenced, inten­sive­ly sur­veilled, and cut off from mul­ti­ple aspects of cit­i­zen­ship includ­ing enti­tle­ment to var­i­ous ben­e­fits and the fran­chise: a “con­stel­la­tion of legal dis­abil­i­ties … [that] is over­whelm­ing­ly repres­sive” (Wake­field et al., 2016).

Incar­cer­at­ed men tend to rem­i­nisce about the vehi­cles they owned and drove in the out­side world, and a few of the peer researchers are pic­tured with their vehi­cles. Once released, they tend to find regain­ing that lev­el of mobil­i­ty dif­fi­cult and cost­ly, even as it is usu­al­ly nec­es­sary for find­ing work, hold­ing on to it, and keep­ing appoint­ments with pro­ba­tion or parole offi­cers. Sim­ply re-acquir­ing a dri­ving licence can involve thou­sands of dol­lars in fees and penal­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly if the per­son in ques­tion had fines that were unpaid at the time of incar­cer­a­tion. With poor or no cred­it rat­ings, the new­ly released are vul­ner­a­ble to exploita­tive lend­ing prac­tices and sky-high inter­est rates for financ­ing over­priced and unre­li­able vehi­cles, and to high prices for the insur­ance that is required in most juris­dic­tions. The result­ing debt can lead to encoun­ters with col­lec­tion agen­cies and ulti­mate­ly police, “when judges … issue arrest war­rants for fail­ure to appear in court on unpaid civ­il debt judg­ments.” A dis­turb­ing par­al­lel exists here with the so-called sub-prime mort­gage mar­ket. In the after­math of the finan­cial cri­sis brought on by that market’s tem­po­rary col­lapse in 2007-08, and the result­ing wave of evic­tions and fore­clo­sures, Sask­ia Sassen per­cep­tive­ly wrote that that issu­ing and then sell­ing-on such high-risk loans is “an effi­cient mech­a­nism for get­ting at the sav­ings of house­holds world­wide … that moves faster than extract­ing prof­its from low­er­ing wages” (Sassen, 2009).

Shaking down the traffic debtor

An unset­tling chap­ter on “shak­ing down the traf­fic debtor” describes a fur­ther lay­er of hard­ship and exploita­tion asso­ci­at­ed with grow­ing reliance by local gov­ern­ments on traf­fic fines as a source of revenue–a process that came to pub­lic atten­tion dra­mat­i­cal­ly after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Fer­gu­son, Mis­souri (see Fig­ure 2, below) because of a fed­er­al Depart­ment of Jus­tice inves­ti­ga­tion. Many peo­ple in the low-wage, pre­car­i­ous labour mar­ket can­not afford traf­fic fines, lead­ing to licence sus­pen­sions if not a down­ward spi­ral of (re)incarceration; “[i]n 2013, Fer­gu­son issued three arrest war­rants for every house­hold.” Liv­ingston and Ross doc­u­ment that the prob­lem is wide­spread, not just local­ized, and con­clude that: “When tick­et­ing is com­bined with the bias of police pro­fil­ing through pre­tex­tu­al search­es, the rent-seek­ing looks more and more like a racial­ly dri­ven extor­tion rack­et.” And as the cas­es of Michael Brown and lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of oth­er casu­al­ties show, “dri­ving while Black” is always accom­pa­nied by the real­iza­tion that any minor encounter with police, which can be trig­gered by myr­i­ad triv­ial con­tra­ven­tions of vehi­cle reg­u­la­tions that present no safe­ty issues, can turn dead­ly. Almost 600 peo­ple were killed by US police after traf­fic stops from 2017 through 2021, and more than 30,000 peo­ple were killed by police in all cir­cum­stances between 1980 and 2018, with Black peo­ple more than three times as like­ly as white peo­ple to be vic­tim­ized. The wall of silence that often sur­rounds such killings per­sists in part because offi­cial data, as dis­tinct from data com­piled from mul­ti­ple sources by orga­ni­za­tions like Map­ping Police Vio­lence, remain seri­ous­ly incomplete.

Political pathologies and their patterns

The pub­li­ca­tion of Cars and Jails comes at an appro­pri­ate time giv­en (at this writ­ing) the police killing of Tyre Nichols as the lat­est in a long line of such events, atyp­i­cal only in terms of the speed with which the offi­cers involved were dis­missed and crim­i­nal­ly charged. It is tempt­ing, but wrong, to regard the book as hav­ing lim­it­ed applic­a­bil­i­ty out­side the US, with its dis­tinc­tive col­lec­tion of polit­i­cal patholo­gies. True, that country’s racial­ly skewed incar­cer­a­tion rate and fre­quen­cy of police vio­lence are out­liers, but some dif­fer­ences are of degree rather than kind. For exam­ple (and these are just exam­ples), between 2014 and 2017 Black and Indige­nous peo­ple were four or five times more like­ly than white peo­ple to be “street checked” by police in Mon­tre­al, Cana­da. The num­ber of police killings is ris­ing rapid­ly in Cana­da, with Black and Indige­nous peo­ple dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly like­ly to be killed (where the race of the vic­tim was known). Black peo­ple were sev­en times as like­ly as white peo­ple to die after police restraint in the Unit­ed King­dom between 2012-13 and 2020-21. A broad­er issue involves those who are exclud­ed from auto-mobil­i­ty for a vari­ety of rea­sons addi­tion­al to those dis­cussed by Liv­ingston and Ross, includ­ing not only finances (more rel­e­vant than ever in the cur­rent cost-of-liv­ing cri­sis) but also age, (dis)ability and oth­er fac­tors includ­ing sim­ple dis­in­cli­na­tion to allo­cate a large share of the house­hold bud­get to get­ting around. For them, trans­port-relat­ed des­per­a­tion can become rou­tine, and even when des­per­a­tion is not involved images like Fig­ure 3, below, pho­tographed just over a kilo­me­tre from Par­lia­ment Hill in Canada’s nation­al cap­i­tal, invite us to con­trast the “free­dom” enjoyed by dri­vers (includ­ing, of course, being stuck in traf­fic) with that of the side­walk users. To be fair, the pedes­tri­an-friend­li­ness of Ottawa city cen­tre has improved some­what since then; that of its sub­urbs, like that of most sub­urbs, has not.

Look­ing to the future, elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of pri­vate vehi­cles in the inter­ests of decar­boniza­tion may achieve many things, but it will not reduce inequal­i­ties in access to mobil­i­ty or their con­se­quences. For that, ini­tia­tives like major and inno­v­a­tive invest­ments in pub­lic trans­port will be need­ed, as well as atten­tion to mak­ing cityscapes more acces­si­ble with­out dri­ving, as the urban dis­tricts where cars are least need­ed are priced out of reach of those who would ben­e­fit most from liv­ing there. The “15 minute city” orga­nized around mak­ing basic ser­vices acces­si­ble by walk­ing, cycling or tran­sit and max­i­miz­ing green space is one promis­ing direc­tion, although with lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion to rur­al areas like those in much of Cana­da where the iso­la­tion of those with­out access to a vehi­cle must be seen at first hand to be under­stood (cf. Alhas­san et al., 2021). Sad­ly, in the cur­rent polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment of deep­en­ing inequal­i­ty of resources and influ­ence such directions–like the polic­ing and reg­u­la­to­ry reforms that Liv­ingston and Ross enumerate–are as improb­a­ble as they are moral­ly imperative.