"Jail on Wheels" is here!

Published with Half-Letter Press, a new essay on a bizarre law enforcement experiment

In a collaboration with Half Letter Press and Mariame Kaba, with funding from the Rauschenberg Foundation, I have a new pamphlet with an essay about Jail on Wheels, a midcentury juvenile crime prevention program run by a New Haven County Sheriff who sent buses loaded with police gear and model electric chairs around the country, where they were seen by more than three million people. Check out the opening below & order here.

Roy Nirschel had had big hopes for the summer of 1974. He’d just graduated from college and was itching to get out of Connecticut, and the ad in the paper offered the perfect opportunity: get paid to drive a bus around the country for a few months.

It probably seemed like good citizenship, too. Roy, student government president emeritus at Southern Connecticut State, was a law-and-order kinda guy. In high school, he was often the lone counterprotester at weekly antiwar demonstrations at Stamford City Hall.

So this sounded just up his alley: “Travel with nationally known mobile crime prevention exhibit, expenses paid, no selling.” The perfect summer gig for a former vice chair of the Connecticut chapter of Young Americans for Freedom.

Well, it sucked.

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