Offshore Detention in Australia: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018)

This article focuses on the “Pacific Solution,” the Australian national policy of controlling illegal migration by detaining refugees in Immigrant Detention Centres in offshore Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru, and the human rights issues it raises. It refers to Behrouz Boochani’s prize-winning refugee memoir, No Friend but the Moun- tains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018) as both a prison narrative of resilience and a politically resistant text, and it discusses Boochani’s representation of Manus Detention camp as “The Kyriarchal System” in terms of Foucault’s “monstrous heterotopia.” The ar- ticle emphasises the issues of accountability and responsibility in the bilateral governance arrangements of the Manus Detention Centre between Australia and Papua New Guinea, and considers the possibility of more humane detention practices in the future.

Impact of Covid-19 on the Global Economy and Migration

The World Health Organization stated COVID-19 a global pandemic, it has quickly spread all over the world, posing immense health, environmental and social challenges to the global population. The coronavirus outbreak is critically interrupting the global trade and has shattered the core sustaining pillars of the modern world economies. Concerns have been raised about policy changes, enforcement actions, immigrant detention, and deportation practices during the outbreak. The impact of COVID-19 on these trends implies new dimensions for global governance and organizations. This article seeks to highlight Azerbaijan's problems in the context of the battle against a pandemic. Because a country's economy has been impacted, a comprehensive study may give a better understanding of the results, illuminating the areas that require more assistance and growth.

Cosponsoring and Cashing In: US House Members’ Support for Punitive Immigration Policy and Financial Payoffs from the Private Prison Industry

The private prison industry is a multi-million-dollar industry that has increasingly profited from the detention of undocumented immigrants. As a government contractor, therefore, the industry has a natural interest in government decision making, including legislation that can affect its expansion into immigrant detention. In this article, we examine the relationship between campaign donations made on behalf of the private prison industry and an untested form of position taking—bill cosponsorship—in the US House of Representatives. We hypothesize the private prison industry will reward House members for taking positions that benefit the industry. We also hypothesize the private prison industry will also reward House members who incur greater political risk by taking positions out of sync with the party. To test our hypotheses, we focus on punitive immigration legislation that has the potential to increase the supply of immigrant detainees over the course of eight years. We find support for our second hypothesis, that private prison companies are more likely to reward House Democrats who cosponsor punitive immigration policies even after accounting for possible endogeneity. The findings have important implications regarding the relationship between House members and private interests.

Pills and Control in the Carceral State

The book review explores Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America by Anthony Ryan Hatch explaining how the contemporary United States’ carceral state—prisons, nursing homes, foster care systems, active duty military, immigrant detention facilities, and schools—is mired in its own self-imposed drug addiction to psychotropic medication to control those in its “care.”

Compounding Racialized Vulnerability: COVID-19 in Prisons, Jails, and Migrant Detention Centers

Context: Carceral institutions are among the largest clusters of COVID-19 in the United States. As outbreaks have spread throughout prisons and detention centers, detainees have organized collectively to demand life-saving measures. Chief among these demands has been the call for decarceration: the release of detainees and inmates to prevent exposure to COVID-19. This paper theorizes the compounding racial vulnerability that has led to such a marked spread behind bars, mainly among race-class subjugated communities. Methods: We use journalistic sources and administrative data to provide an in-depth account of the spread of COVID-19 in American correctional facilities and of the mobilization to reduce contagions. We also use two survey experiments to describe public support for harm reduction and decarceration demands and measure the effects of information about (a) racial inequalities in prison, and (b) poor conditions inside migrant detention centers. Findings: We find that only one-third to one-half of respondents believe that response to COVID-19 in prisons and immigrant detention centers should be a high priority. We also find that Americans are much more supportive of harm reduction measures like improved sanitation than of releasing people from prisons and detention centers. Information about racial disparities increases support for releasing more people from prison. We do not find any significant effect of information about poor conditions in migrant detention centers. Conclusions: The conditions in prisons and migrant detention centers during the pandemic—and public opinion about them—highlight the realities of compounding racialized vulnerability in the United States.

Conclusion

Although the Supreme Court limited detention for non-citizens in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Zadvydas [2000] and Martinez [2005]), its most recent decisions indicate that under certain circumstances non-citizens can be held indefinitely behind bars with no possibility of even a bond hearing. In practice, non-citizens deemed excludable from the United States are like the forever prisoners of Guantanamo, exposed to massive state power with few constitutional protections. Khalid Qassim is one of the forty Guantanamo detainees held for more than eighteen years to date with no charges and no trial. Although Guantanamo prisoners are not voluntary immigrants, they share with immigrants a lack of protection by the US Constitution and a vulnerability to indefinite detention. Immigrant detention today is part of a carceral landscape in the United States that includes more than 2 million citizens behind bars.