American Gulag : Inside U.s. Immigration Prisons

In the article “Deportation Before Incarceration” by Peter H. Schuck, he proposes an innovative way to help alleviate overcrowding in the United States prison system – the deportation of some immigrants before they enter prison. What makes Schuck’s article effective is his use of the rhetorical device known as organization. By organizing his paper starting with background information of the topic at hand; including several other proposals and examining the faults of each; setting up his point with the laws already established; offering a solution, his proposal, to overcrowding in the prison system; and finally, with a strong conclusion that recaps the entirety of the article, Schuck makes an effective article.

The conditions within the immigrant detention facilities are absolutely horrendous. According to ThinkProgress.org, as of 2016, nine of the 10 largest detention centers in the country are run by private prison companies. In the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a detention facility that was once a medium security prison was sued by American Civil Liberties Union for the “prison-like” conditions they put children and families in. “Children were required to wear prison jumpsuits, held in small cells, and limited to an hour of outdoor playtime per day.” 29 year old, Zelaya was forced to manage her sickle cell anemia without treatment, developed serious stomach problems, and fell into a deep depression while at this detention center. This is only one story amongst several others across the U.S.

This paper will attempt to validate the abusive nature within ICE’s Immigration Detention Centers. Specifically, the abuse that women and children suffer by high risk detainees and ICE agents within the detention centers. Additionally, this paper will also challenge the infrastructure along the southwest border, specifically on overcrowded and antiquated detention centers. Furthermore, how the financial impact to detain, process and release or deportation of undocumented immigrants has become a burden on U.S. tax payers. Lastly, how the lack of concern for human rights has become a crisis at the U.S. and Mexican border.

Criminality in our country is often assigned to you at birth determined by trivial categories such as race, class, gender, immigration status, religion, and the list can continue forever. Life outcomes can be predetermined when taking all of these identities into account, making someone more susceptible to the reach of the mass incarceration system. However, I will be focusing on undocumented immigrants and how being seen as “illegal” is part of their daily lived experiences and how there are very strong parallels between the immigration detention centers and prisons in the United States. Undocumented people experience similar forms of social and political disenfranchisement that people affected by the criminal justice system also have to

Name: Lecturer: Course: Date of Submission: Mass incarceration in American Prisons Introduction More than 2.3 million Americans today are prisoners, a population that represents more than a quarter of the number of prisoners in the world. This means that 760 Americans in one hundred thousand are prisoners in America (Detotto and Pulina). The rise in prisoners’ numbers has sharply risen since 1980 with the cost of maintaining the prison going to over four hundred percent within the same period.

Immigration is one of the central themes of the founding of the United States and as such it is often the epicenter of controversy among both citizens and policymakers. Throughout the twentieth century, American citizens and policymakers have brought to the forefront the importance of immigration and the role immigrants play within society. This can be a cause of friction between immigrants and multi-generational citizens because immigrants are often viewed with a negative connotation. They are often blamed for stealing jobs from hardworking citizens, draining the healthcare system and adding to the homeless population. They are associated with crime, poverty and in general they are perceived as undesirable members of society (Spenkuch, 2014). The relationship between crime and immigrants is of particular importance because there is a common perception that immigrants cause crime and their neighborhoods are riddled with criminal activity. Also important to note is that the characteristics of immigrants tend to coincide with members of the native-born population that are disproportionally incarceration. In general, they are poorly educated, earn low wages and are young, males. This led to the perception that incoming immigrants continuously add to the lower class, criminal population. In order to clearly understand the relationship between the two concepts they must be examined both from a theoretical and empirical viewpoint

For my research topic, I will be exploring the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and post-9/11 border militarization on the issues of criminalization of immigration and the inequality and structural violence immigrants face in detention centers specifically at the U.S.-Mexico Border. National awareness on issues such as oversight of detention centers, conditions within detention centers, as well as the inhumane practices detained immigrants are subjected to have risen within the last decade. Immigration detention has become the fastest growing form of incarceration in the United States, and immigrants are the fastest growing population in federal prisons (Lopez & Light, 2009). Nearly 30,000 immigrants are detained

Although events such as San Bernardino in 2015 provide anecdotal evidence of immigrants committing acts of extreme violence, these events are extremely rare. Nonetheless, tragedies such as these inevitably grab headlines and capture the attention of millions of Americans across the country. Tragedies such as the attack in San Bernardino hold strong emotional appeal to proponents for restrictive immigration policy. However, these rare and uncontrollable events should not provide the base of logic for America’s national immigration policy as they are not a proxy for immigrant behavior as a whole. Various statistics regarding crime among immigrants may reveal an underlying reason for lower crime rates, which is that the majority of immigrants understand the implications of committing a crime and know that it would not be in their best interest as a new member of the country they wish to call home. Natives, moreover, have crime rates five times that of immigrants. This demonstrates the potential positive externalities that immigrants contribute to the social sphere by lowering the crime rate and acting as models within urban America.

Illegal immigrants have been a hot topic lately due to the popularity of this topic amongst the Republican Presidential Nominees, especially Donald Trump. These illegal immigrants bring various things to this country when they come. Some things are positive, such as a family simply seeking to find a better life, while some things are harmful to the United States, such as the amount of crime among illegal immigrants. In July 2015, the most recent estimate of illegal immigrants was 11.2 million. This same data shoes that 56 percent of all deportations last year were convicted criminals, which accounted for 177,960 individuals (Shoichet, 2015). Crime among illegal immigrants is a problem, and sanctuary cities, which are supposed to be a solution, may be making this problem worse.

Equalizing the constitutional rights of prisoners and the functions of the jail or prison can create great strain on not only the correctional facilities’ staff but on the inmates as well. The treatment of prisoners is typically left completely to the prudence of prison administrators and other correctional officials. With that being said, this paper will discuss the differences between harmonizing those constitutional rights of prisoners and the functions of the facility. It will also explain the rights that prisoners are required to have, and how these rights are balanced within other aspects of the correctional institution.

Many people assume that racist legislation put into place in the 1960’s and 70’s led to the mass incarceration of the minority groups. Since these acts have been put into place, the United States has been named the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, by an astounding amount. Former president Barack Obama states, “The United States is home to 5 percent of the world population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Think about that.” Barack Obama is insisting that citizens of the United states need to

However, recent statistics show Canada’s recent immigrants are better educated, on average, than native-born Canadians (Ceobanu, 2011). Large portions of the people tend to consider immigrants as a large contributor to todays share of crime. While the impact of immigration on crime governs the political debate in most of harboring countries, there is however, very little evidence to support this evidence. Its impact on crime is left unexplored due to the fact that most researchers focus on the impact of immigrants on labor markets (Almeida, Johnson, McNamara & Gupta, 2011). The National Identity however, conducted a survey in 1995 and 2003 by the International Social Survey Programme displaying that people tend to worry that “immigrants increase crime rates” rather than “immigrants take jobs away from natives”(Almeida, Johnson, McNamara & Gupta, 2011). This report hopes to seek the issues set behind immigration and crime. However, there it very little data to convey all views of both sides of the debate. This essay will examine recent sociological studies to attempt to bridge the gap as to why immigrants are seen to be involved in criminal activity. This essay will examine recent sociological studies in order to determine rise in immigrations and a rise in crime rates are positively correlated based on sociological research. To further understand if

Since 2003, many Chinese citizens have been detained in extralegal detention facilities throughout the country known as “black jails.” Detainees within these jails, which are created for the purpose of detaining petitioners who seek rectification for problems at local and provincial levels of government, are subjected to a multitude of physical and psychological abuses. This paper analyzes the conditions that caused these detention facilities to appear, assesses the abuses and rights violations perpetuated by these jails, and offers several potential steps that American policymakers can take to address this issue.Introduction

For over a century, a huge number of studies have confirmed two basic yet powerful truths about the relationship amongst immigration and crime. Immigrants are less inclined to perform serious violations or be in a correctional facility than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are related to lower rates of violent or serious crimes and property crime. This remains constant for both legal immigrants and the unauthorized, paying little mind to their country of origin or level of education. In other words, almost all immigrants are not "offenders or criminals" by any generally acknowledged meaning of the term. For this reason, harsh or many of those immigration policies are not effective in battling

Austin, J., Irwin, J. (2001). “It's About Time: America's Imprisonment Binge.” Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co