Cars and Jails: Interview with Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross

How does the automobile—the All American symbol of freedom--become part of a “cascading” process of unfreedom for recently incarcerated people?  Livingston and Ross, members of the NYU Prison Education Research Lab, talk about how cars, a necessity for securing work for so many and a symbol of independence and mobility, are enmeshed within interlinked systems that create and perpetuate debt, precarity, and sometimes death.  Through predatory lending, unscrupulous auto dealers, revenue-seeking and gratuitously harassing traffic stops and citations, and data systems built into the hardware and software of vehicles that feed into a number of dangerous data bases, the “open road” can become dangerous and deadly, especially for Black and Brown peoples, who often succumb to what Livingston calls the “power of capture.”

Against that bleak picture, Ross and Livingston tell stories of support networks and offer us important ways to bring about what they call “Mobility Justice.”

“As cornerstones of life under racial capitalism, the automobile and prison exemplify the ease with which the quotidian can become deadly. Livingston and Ross, with the support of formerly incarcerated peer researchers, have produced an extraordinary example of how critical carceral studies can enlighten, complicate and inspire.” Angela Y. Davis.

Andrew Ross is a social activist and professor at NYU, where he teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Prison Education Program. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including, most recently, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing. 

Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. Her previous books include Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa; Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic; and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, in 2013 Livingston was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.