Built in 1837, the Essex County Jail operated in Newark for more than a century. During the 1967 Newark rebellion, hundreds of people arrested in the unrest were confined there. The jail closed in 1970 and was subsequently abandoned, leaving behind cellblocks, barred windows and deteriorating corridors within sight of downtown Newark. Its ruins preserve a physical record of nineteenth- and twentieth-century incarceration and its place within the history of the city.

When I photographed the abandoned Essex County Jail, I thought about my own encounters with police and how differently they might have gone if I were Black. As a Rutgers student, a fraternity prank once ended with me running from a New Brunswick police officer with his gun drawn. I also had a cousin who worked for years as a guard at Rikers. Those experiences make prisons and policing less abstract to me.