From Penal to "Civil": A Legacy of Private Prison Policy in a Landscape of Migrant Detention

Lopez, Sarah

doi:10.1353/aq.2019.0005

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…REITs are now more common in a range of outsourced government care services, like hospitals, elderly care, and housing (Horton 2021), university student housing (Revington and August 2020), and public housing (Fields 2018). This shift places new pressures on firms to create or attract new income streams (such as electronic monitoring [Boe 2020]), to cut staff costs (Bauer 2018), and to redesign facilities to be easily repurposed (Lopez 2019). This shift also led CoreCivic and GEO Group to repackage their corrections operations as, first, specialised real estate and, second, essential government services.…”

Section: Outsourcing Detention Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising US Immigration Detention as Carceral Real Estate

Martin

2023

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The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates the largest detention system in the world, holding over 35,000 people in October 2023. The vast majority of this capacity is outsourced to corrections firms, particularly the two largest, CoreCivic and GEO Group. This article analyses how private corrections firms finance US immigrant detention capacity as a specialised asset class of government real estate. To understand the emergence of “carceral real estate”, I bring political geographies of migration into conversation with economic geographies of real estate. In doing so, I argue that creating “carceral real estate” enables the abstraction and valuation of migrant life as rent and, in turn, presumes a continuously flowing, fungible migrant population. In this context, migrants valued as underpaid labour in the wider economy are re‐valued for their unproductivity in detention. And yet this idealised geography of human and economic flows never fully materialises, but is instead rife with volatility, disruption, and political contestation. The article closes by discussing implications for abolition geographies.

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Section: Outsourcing Detention Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising US Immigration Detention as Carceral Real Estate

Martin

2023

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“…The first salient body of scholarly inquiry has exposed the ways in which migrant detention facilities, despite their “civil” label, are in fact “immigration prisons” that function as sites of penal control (Dow 2004). Private prison companies often operate civil detention centers (Lopez 2019; Welch 2000) and employ guards who monitor all movements, meals, and personal visits (García Hernández 2014). Civil immigration detention also takes place within existing prisons and jails, the very same facilities that house individuals awaiting a criminal trial or serving a carceral sentence (Stumpf 2014; Lloyd and Mountz 2018).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Institutional Hearing Program: A Study of Prison-Based Immigration Courts in the United States

Eagly¹,

Shafer²

2020

Law Soc Rev

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This article presents the findings of the first research study of the Institutional Hearing Program (IHP), a prison‐based immigration court system run by the U.S. Department of Justice. Although the IHP has existed for four decades, little is publicly known about the program's origin, development, or significance. Based on original analysis of archival records, this study makes three central contributions. First, it traces the origin and growth of the IHP within federal, state, and municipal correctional facilities. Notably, although the IHP began in 1980 as a program to deport Cuban asylum seekers held in civil detention in an Atlanta prison, it now operates to deport noncitizens serving prison sentences in twenty‐three federal prisons, nineteen state prison systems, and a few municipal jails. Second, this article uncovers the crucial role that prison‐based immigration courts have played in shaping the design of carceral institutions around the priorities of an immigration system that primarily targets Latinos for deportation. Third, this article shows how immigration courts embedded in carceral spaces have served as influential, yet overlooked, incubators of changes to immigration law and practice that today apply to all immigration courts, not just the IHP. These findings have important implications for contemporary understandings of the relationship between immigration detention, racialized control of migration, and penal punishment.

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“…98–99), contributes to mass incarceration, and she supports her position by exploring the legal differences between ICE detainees and “regular” non-ICE prisoners. Although the work by detainees in ICE facilities is similar to work done by others incarcerated in U.S. prisons (see Amuedo-Dorantes and Lopez 2022; Lopez 2019), the legality of imprisoned people matters; ICE facilities must ask detainees to “volunteer” in the prison’s work program (p. 92), which allows jails and prisons to extract profits out of detained immigrants in unregulated carceral spaces. This chapter stands out for its theoretical approach; although the theoretical argument about the political economy of private prisons makes sense, extracting profits from carceral labor is not unique to private prisons.…”

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confidence: 99%

Prison Labor across the Carceral Continuum

Middlemass

2023

Contemp Sociol

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levels, with regional winners of the lower division replacing the bottom (last place) two teams that drop down one competitive level for the following season. Typically, the lowest tier is comparable in talent to a local YMCA adult recreational sport league. Above the bottom two levels, players are compensated according to their ability and value to their team.In this book, Guest has done an excellent job by blending relevant sociological concepts to explain soccer's extraordinary international importance and popularity while acknowledging that the game remains irrelevant to most U.S. sport fans.

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From Penal to "Civil": A Legacy of Private Prison Policy in a Landscape of Migrant Detention

Cited by 5 publications

References 8 publications

Conceptualising US Immigration Detention as Carceral Real Estate

Conceptualising US Immigration Detention as Carceral Real Estate

The Institutional Hearing Program: A Study of Prison-Based Immigration Courts in the United States

Prison Labor across the Carceral Continuum

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