The excessive incarceration of undocumented immigrants and other non-citizens currently residing within the U.S. border has accelerated since the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the Justice Policy Journal reports.
Criminalizing immigration has rapidly accelerated since September 2001, the study for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice concluded.
“The United States has developed a prison-industrial complex,” the report said.
Proponents contend that the private sector can more efficiently provide services than the government, leading to cost containment and the reduction of the federal budget and debt,” the study stated.
The sentiment toward undocumented immigrants has soured since 2001, according to the study prepared by Alissa R. Ackerman and Rich Furman of the University of Washington and Meghan Sacks of Fairleigh Dickinson University.
The detention of immigrants and noncitizen residents in the United States is nothing new, nor is the use of incarceration as the primary means to punishment its citizens, the study says.
The authors report undocumented immigrants are a primary target of the prison industrial complex.
“The immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has partnered with the private prison industry to detain immigrants. Some scholars have argued that this movement is part of a ‘new penology’ where immigrants are determined to be a dangerous and risky segment of the population that must be controlled,” the study said.
Private prison companies obtain the most revenue from state prison contracts and it stands to reason that as state prison population decrease, so too will profits. To this end, it is essential that streams of profit must continue to flow. Immigrant detention and the criminalization of immigration will provide that revenue, the researchers claim.
According to the study, “Approximately 12 percent of the federal prison population is currently comprised of individuals convicted of or awaiting trial for immigration offenses. There are conflicting reports as to how many immigrant detainees are housed in private facilities.”
ICE reports “17 percent of individuals detained by them are housed in contract, or private facilities in 2012.” However, an Associated Press report from the same year suggests nearly half of immigrant detainees were held by private prison corporations, the report noted.
There were around 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. today. According to researchers, this does not include roughly 33,000 people who were detained every day by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Ackerman, Furman and Sacks defined a new penology as the management, surveillance and control of a specific group of people. It’s about identifying and managing these disobedient groups.
A religiously and ethnically constituted group of Muslim and Arab men has allegedly victimized the American public. “As a result, law enforcement tactics such as racial profiling and preventive detention that would have shocked the nation 20 years ago are tolerated and even condoned as a ‘necessary evil’ for the protection of national security,” according to the study.
The study asserts that rehabilitation is no longer the model of the criminal justice system. This was evidenced by the increase and disparities that led to a public movement of harsher sentencing legislation.
New sentencing laws resulted in a noticeable shift from rehabilitation to retribution and incapacitation. In their opinion, danger management is a part of the move to a new penology.
“These laws have provided the political climate to detain more people. The number of individuals detained has risen exponentially over the last 30 years and corresponds with the rise of the overall U.S. prison population,” the study said.
Three major transformations accompanied this shift to the new penology. According to their study, “the language of clinical diagnosis has been replaced by the language of probability and risk; the goal of reducing recidivism is abandoned for an increasingly efficient system of control; and the strategy of targeting individuals has been replaced by a focus on aggregate populations of offenders.”
The authors of the study wrote, “Selective incapacitation policies moved to the forefront of the criminal justice system in the 1980s. These policies seek to identify and incapacitate high rate offenders at the height of their offending in order to reduce crime”
The new penology is present in immigration policies, the study claims. “The priorities of the immigration system have shifted and can be seen by the growth of immigration law enforcement, the targeting of immigrants with criminal background for law enforcement, the increasing percentage of noncitizens being detained, and the paradoxical growth of admittance into and deportation from the United States at the same time.”
The study adds, “The new penology corresponds with and reinforces one of the most profound changes in U.S. incarceration and most importantly in the incarceration and detention of immigrants: the privatization of prisons. This phenomenon is apparent in the accelerated growth of the private prison industry.”
This rise in the prison population “obviously includes the undocumented, but may also include refugees, asylum seekers and even U.S. citizens that appear to meet some physical or ethnic criteria,” the study reads.
Instead of being well informed about the realities of immigration, policy and reform, the American public has been appeased by the new penology and remains relatively silent on the realities of detection, detention and deportation, the study concludes.
