Beyond Walls and Cages: U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants

Thursday, August 6, 2009

U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants

By NINA BERNSTEIN
New York Times
Published: August 5, 2009

The Obama administration intends to announce an ambitious plan on Thursday
to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration
violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail and prison cells to
what its new chief called a “truly civil detention system.”

Details are sketchy, and even the first steps will take months or years to
complete. They include reviewing the federal government’s contracts with more
than 350 local jails and private prisons, with an eye toward consolidating many
detainees in places more suitable for noncriminals facing deportation — some
possibly in centers built and run by the government.

The plan aims to establish more centralized authority over the system,
which holds about 400,000 immigration detainees over the course of a year, and
more direct oversight of detention centers that have come under fire for
mistreatment of detainees and substandard — sometimes fatal — medical care.

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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.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants

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