Beyond Walls and Cages: Inside Immigrant Prisons

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Inside Immigrant Prisons

By Maria Muentes and Familes for Freedom

Recently, the Donald Wyatt Center in Rhode Island lost its contract with U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to house 153 immigrant prisoners after
the horrific death of a detainee. Center representatives publicly bemoaned the
loss of $100,000 per week and quickly began looking for a way to get more
prisoners. The chairman of the board for the center, Daniel Cooney, said,
“Frankly, I’m looking at it like I’m running a Motel 6. I don’t care if it’s
Guantanamo Bay. We want to fill the beds.” He was eventually fired in the
fallout from this remark, but his candor is revealing. Immigrant prisoners are
valuable commodities to local jails. This approach boosts the economies of
private prison companies and municipalities but costs the federal government
millions—perhaps billions—of dollars.

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Beyond Walls and Cages

Bridging Prison Abolition and Immigrant Justice Movements

Description and Purpose:
In the US, some 2.4 million people are imprisoned while 1.6 million migrants have been deported since 1996. On a world scale, while most people’s movement is constrained by a system of global apartheid, policing strategies are shared across national borders that are commonly used to crack down on political organizing and dissent. What are the connections between the prison industrial complex and migration policies that are symbolized by deadly cages and walls? How do these different state policies both divide and connect different groups of people across nationality, citizenship, race, class, gender, and sexuality? What work do these sturdy tools of division, isolation, and control do at this moment of economic crisis? What are the ideologies that make walls and cages seem so durable, and what cracks in these edifices can movements for social justice and liberation open up?

Making links between prison policies and migration policies is important for being able to understand and challenge white supremacy, US imperialism, capitalism, and militarization. We want to understand the ways in which the prison abolition and immigrant justice movements are opposing state violence and the creative ways in which they are working to build a world without walls and cages. How might organizing around the “right to stay” be a way of bridging communities who face economic dislocation – whether through free trade policies or gentrification – and repressive state policies alike?

How did we put this book together?
We called for papers and solicited contributions for a book that brings materials from people who are directly affected by these systems together with work from organizers, activists, advocates, artists, poets, and researchers. We edited these contributions and found a press that was interested in publishing them.

In September and October, 2009, we also took to the road to get a closer look at the ways in which immigrant detention is building on the system of mass incarceration in the South and Southwest. How are these systems shaping the livelihoods and organizing of communities who are most affected by hyper-policing? And what changes, if any, is the current economic crisis having on these systems?

About the editors:
Jenna Loyd is a writer and researcher who is based in Syracuse, NY. Matt Mitchelson is a geographer researching imprisonment and working with former prisoners. Andrew Burridge is a geographer and activist working towards freedom of movement within the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and beyond.

If you are interested in learning more about or contributing to this project, please contact us at nowallsnocages@gmail.com.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Inside Immigrant Prisons

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