North County Jail

This article explores the history of jail construction and architecture on the occasion of a now vacant North County Jail that sits in the center of downtown Oakland. Put to use neither by the state as COVID-19 ravaged overcrowded prisons nor by the city trying to find ways of offering shelter to the houseless, its vacancy became all the more material during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. What do abolitionists do with such vacancies? Inspired by the sonic geography of Angela Davis's memories of the New York Women's House of Detention, this article is a performance of how abolitionist thought both engages and exceeds the terms of panopticism by focusing on the curious boundary of the panoptic jail window. The sculptural abolitionist imaginaries provoked by conceptual artists Sonya Clark and Charisse Pearlina Weston provide new ways of doing things with the shadows and sounds these windows reflect, transmit, and occlude.