Crackdown On Pro-Palestinian Dissent Nabs New York Professor Who Found Link Between Cars and Incarceration
One of two New York University (NYU) tenured faculty members barred from parts of its campus in December 2024 is a sociologist who has documented a link between the proliferation of American car culture and mass incarceration.
Andrew Ross and fellow professor Sonya Posmentier were declared persona non grata by the university after taking part in a demonstration at the campus library on December 12, 2024, against the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. Both were arrested and charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct and trespassing for refusing to cut short their protest—a move the American Association of University Professors decried as “part of a distressing pattern of repression of pro-Palestinian speech on college campuses.”
In November 2022, Ross and fellow researcher Julie Livingston published Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality, tracing the route to prison from dependence on a car for work, shopping and entertainment. About 85% of car buyers go into debt for their purchase, and 26% of those buyers were forced into higher-rate loans. A traffic accident or DUI—even just being targeted by cops in a cash-starved municipality that has turned to over-policing for ticket revenue—can then result in criminal charges and job loss. After that, mounting unpaid debt can expand a minor case into detention for nonpayment of fines and fees.
“We can visualize and understand the cycle, but it’s not that any one individual often goes through the entire cycle, though certainly some people do,” Livingston said.
“It was remarkable how many pathways we found and connections we found between the need to own and drive a car, and ending up behind bars,” Ross said, noting “how easy it [is] actually to end up behind bars despite the fact that debtors’ prisons have been abolished since 1833 in this country. It was a real eye opener for us.”
Sources: Market Watch, NBC News
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