Detain and Punish
In Detain and Punish, Carl Lindskoog provides the first in-depth history of immigration detention in the United States. Employing extensive archival research to document the origins and development of immigration detention in the U.S. from 1973 to 2000, it reveals how the world’s largest detention system originated in the U.S. government’s campaign to exclude Haitians from American shores, and how resistance by Haitians and their allies constantly challenged the detention regime. From the Krome Avenue Detention Center in Miami, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to jails and prisons across the country, Haitians have been at the center of the story of immigration detention. Contrary to the notion that immigration detention serves a merely administrative function, this history shows the intentionally punitive design of the modern detention regime. From its origin, immigration detention was designed to deter asylum seekers and unauthorized migrants by depriving them of their liberty; to detain and punish. And while Haitians were the first to be targeted by this deterrence-through-punishment policy, Central American asylum seekers and many others were soon ensnared in the expanding web of detention. Just as immigration detention was re-emerging in the late-1970s, taking root in the 1980s, and then exploding in the 1990s, the United States was constructing a parallel system of mass incarceration for its own citizens. Racialized mass incarceration for both citizens and non-citizens thus emerged as a critical element of social, political, and economic life in the United States in the late-twentieth century. This book explains how it came to be.