Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control

In an era of mass mobility, those who are permitted to migrate and those who are criminalized, controlled, and prohibited from migrating are heavily patterned by race. By placing race at the centre of its analysis, this volume brings together fourteen essays that examine, question, and explain the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control. Through the lens of race, we see how criminal justice and migration enmesh in order to exclude, stop, and excise racialized citizens and non-citizens from societies across the world within, beyond, and along borders. Neatly organized in four parts, the book begins with chapters that present a conceptual analysis of race, borders, and social control, moving to the institutions that make up and shape the criminal justice and migration complex. The remaining chapters are convened around the key sites where criminal justice and migration control intersect: policing, courts, and punishment. Together the volume presents a critical and timely analysis of how race shapes and complicates mobility and how racism is enabled and reanimated when criminal justice and migration control coalesce. Race and the meaning of race in relation to citizenship and belonging are excavated throughout the chapters presented in the book, thereby transforming the way we think about migration.

Author(s):  
Mary Bosworth ◽  
Alpa Parmar ◽  
Yolanda Vázquez

In the introductory chapter the editors discuss why a volume that brings together race, migration, and criminal justice, in a way that speaks to issues of belonging, is both timely and necessary. In highlighting the gaps in various disciplinary literatures including the sociology of migration, criminology, and immigration law, this collection of essays discusses explicitly how concerns about race and ethnicity animate many of the state and popular responses to the growing numbers of migrants across the world. Race and the meaning of race in relation to citizenship and belonging is excavated through the chapters presented in the book, and the book as a whole thereby transforming the way we think about migration and the construction of boundaries and borders.


AmeriQuests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aubrianne Norton

Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging, edited by Mary Bosworth, Apla Parmar, and Yolanda Vazquez, is an anthology of essays involving the intersectionality of race separated into four sections: 1) Race, Borders, and Social Control; 2) Race, Policing, and Security; 3) Race, Courts, and the Law; and 4) Race, Detention, and Deportation. As an introduction to intersectionality between race, and gender and class, this anthology gives a somewhat comprehensive compilation of migration issues stemming in countries that exercise firm control over migration of incoming migrants and exiting migrants. Each article focuses on an issue ongoing with a specific population of people, and how the mechanisms in place for migration function criminally and divisively.  


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alpa Parmar

In this article I examine ‘Operation Nexus’, a collaborative initiative between the police and immigration enforcement in the UK, and its impact on foreign national and minority ethnic suspects of offending. I explain how strategic policing aims to manage migration around notions such as ‘high harm’ offenders, target those who appear ‘foreign’ as well as visible ethnic minority suspects, the latter of which may hold citizenship in the UK. The consequences of Operation Nexus are therefore wider than its stated aim because it legitimizes racial profiling by the police and has negative consequences on notions of belonging for racialized foreign nationals and citizens albeit in different ways. By presenting empirical research with those who implement Operation Nexus as well as those who experience it, I elucidate how the policing of migration revives and extends colonial premises that connect nationality, race and criminalization within the expanding and merging realm of contemporary criminal justice and migration control. I draw on Lerman and Weaver’s thesis that when contemporary criminal justice policies disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities, they create an unequal group of people that are exiled within their own society and disenfranchised from public institutions such as the police.


Author(s):  
Mary Bosworth

Since creating the Returns and Reintegration Fund in 2008, the British government has financed a variety of initiatives around the world under the rubric of “managing migration,” blurring the boundaries between migration control and punishment. This article documents and explores a series of overlapping case studies undertaken in Nigeria and Jamaica where the United Kingdom has funded prison building programs, mandatory prisoner transfer agreements, prison training programs, and resettlement assistance for deportees. These initiatives demonstrate in quite concrete ways a series of interconnections between criminal justice and migration control that are both novel and, in their postcolonial location, familiar. In their ties to international development and foreign policy, they also illuminate how humanitarianism allows penal power to move beyond the nation state, raising important questions about our understanding of punishment and its application.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Bosworth ◽  
Katja Franko ◽  
Sharon Pickering

This article considers the future of punishment in a world shaped by competing and reinforcing forces of globalization and nationalism. In it, we call for a wider conversation about the growing interdependence between criminal justice and migration control and of its implications for many of the key concepts and approaches within the field of punishment and society. The article examines the renewed salience of defending borders and drawing boundaries between members and non-members, as well as the shifting focus of penal power from issues of imprisonment and morality, towards questions of immobilization and expulsion from the polity. By doing so, it also addresses the gaps in the existing theories and narratives about penality, which fail to take properly into account the implications of global connectivity, while overlooking enduring matters of racial and class inequity. Finally, the article points out how the progressive destabilization of citizenship and the precarity of membership and belonging are inimically linked to increasingly potent exhortations of penal power that affect us all.


2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 302-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Cracknell

Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) promised a ‘revolution’ in the way offenders are managed, providing a renewed focus on short sentence prisoners. The TR reforms extends mandatory post-release supervision and tailored through-the-gate resettlement provisions to a group that has predominantly faced a ‘history of neglect’ yet often present with the most acute needs within the criminal justice system. However, existing literature underlines that serving short sentences lacks ‘utility’ and can be counter-productive to facilitating effective rehabilitation. This article explores the purposes of providing post-release supervision for short sentences, firstly exploring a previous attempt to reform short sentences, the now defunct ‘Custody Plus’ within the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, and then the Offender Rehabilitation Act (ORA) 2014 within the TR reforms. This article contends that both post-release reforms have sought to re-affirm and re-legitimise prison as the dominant form of punishment in society – or what Carlen refers to as ‘carceral clawback’. This article will also use Cohen’s analysis on social control to establish that post-release supervision will serve to ‘widen the net’, extend the period of punishment and oversight and will only reinforce a form of enforced ‘state-obligated rehabilitation’ that will undermine efforts made to resettle short sentence prisoners.


2017 ◽  
Vol 225 (4) ◽  
pp. 324-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitrios Barkas ◽  
Xenia Chryssochoou

Abstract. This research took place just after the end of the protests following the killing of a 16-year-old boy by a policeman in Greece in December 2008. Participants (N = 224) were 16-year-olds in different schools in Attiki. Informed by the Politicized Collective Identity Model ( Simon & Klandermans, 2001 ), a questionnaire measuring grievances, adversarial attributions, emotions, vulnerability, identifications with students and activists, and questions about justice and Greek society in the future, as well as about youngsters’ participation in different actions, was completed. Four profiles of the participants emerged from a cluster analysis using representations of the conflict, emotions, and identifications with activists and students. These profiles differed on beliefs about the future of Greece, participants’ economic vulnerability, and forms of participation. Importantly, the clusters corresponded to students from schools of different socioeconomic areas. The results indicate that the way young people interpret the events and the context, their levels of identification, and the way they represent society are important factors of their political socialization that impacts on their forms of participation. Political socialization seems to be related to youngsters’ position in society which probably constitutes an important anchoring point of their interpretation of the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-443
Author(s):  
Paul Mazey

This article considers how pre-existing music has been employed in British cinema, paying particular attention to the diegetic/nondiegetic boundary and notions of restraint. It explores the significance of the distinction between diegetic music, which exists in the world of the narrative, and nondiegetic music, which does not. It analyses the use of pre-existing operatic music in two British films of the same era and genre: Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), and demonstrates how seemingly subtle variations in the way music is used in these films produce markedly different effects. Specifically, it investigates the meaning of the music in its original context and finds that only when this bears a narrative relevance to the film does it cross from the diegetic to the nondiegetic plane. This reveals that whereas music restricted to the diegetic plane may express the outward projection of the characters' emotions, music also heard on the nondiegetic track may reveal a deeper truth about their feelings. In this way, the meaning of the music varies depending upon how it is used. While these two films may differ in whether or not their pre-existing music occupies a nondiegetic or diegetic position in relation to the narrative, both are characteristic of this era of British film-making in using music in an understated manner which expresses a sense of emotional restraint and which marks the films with a particularly British inflection.


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