FOREVER PRISONERS

“Immigrant detention today is part of a carceral landscape in the United States that includes more than 2 million citizens behind bars.” So writes historian Young in a sweeping survey of the American gulag.

The U.S. has the largest imprisoned population in the world; it also has the world’s largest number of imprisoned foreigners. These are not coincidences, writes the author. Immigration and penal policy have always been thoroughly racialized. Nor is it an accident that the next-highest number of imprisoned foreigners are in Mexico—not because Mexico is especially hostile to immigrants, but “because almost all of those detentions are at the behest of the United States.” The Obama administration retains the record for the largest number of arrests and deportations of foreigners, but add in the number kept from reaching this country due to Mexican interdiction and deportation and the number of detainees in secret CIA prisons and prisons run by proxies elsewhere, and the number might be larger still today. Young centers on immigration policy over the last century to deliver surprising lessons from history. “Foreign policy is always part of the calculus of immigration control,” he writes, but it is during times of “heightened fear” and alarm that the greatest excesses are committed. It is well known, for instance, that Japanese Americans were imprisoned as suspected enemy aliens during World War II, but it will come as news to many readers that the U.S. coordinated with allied nations such as Peru to kidnap Japanese nationals and bring them to American prison camps. In another case study, Young examines a deportee and long-term prisoner who was housed in an insane asylum, a convenient place to tuck away problem cases. More recent prison activity for both citizens and foreigners hinges on “tough on crime” policies that have mostly been aimed at minority populations, especially “black and brown men.”

An altogether sobering look at a system of punishment founded on racial injustice and going strong.