Abstract
How did a range of federal, state, local, and privatized institutions evolve in the 20th century to create the system of incarceration, removal, and displacement we see today against racialized groups? Caging Borders and Carceral States edited by Robert T. Chase addresses this question by exploring the history of the racialized oppression produced by carceral regimes across the United States’ Sunbelt, which includes the states of Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas, most of California, and parts of North Carolina, Nevada, and Utah. Focusing on the 20th century, this volume examines significant events that have laid down the roots for mass incarceration, detention, and deportation in the United States. While most of the book focuses on the creation of oppressive carceral networks, it also includes chapters that center on a history of resistance against imprisonment. The particular components of the carceral network studied in this volume include convict leasing, jails, state and privatized prisons, detention centers, Indian reservations, and more.
The essays in Part I focus on immigration detention, deportation, and transnational resistance. David Manuel Hernández traces the history of racialized immigration enforcement that targeted Asian and Latinx immigrants in the United States. He describes how the legacy of racist immigration policies connects to contemporary expansions of prison and detention. Ethan Blue examines the early 20th-century history of deportation in the United States by exploring the role of private rail transportation. Blue explains how deportation trains reinforced the settler colonial and capitalist project of the United States. According to Blue, deportation trains helped build a foundation of carceral mobility that restricts and forces the movement of migrants. Blue concludes that the use of private railroads to deport immigrants indicates how the roots of contemporary privatized detention can be traced back to before the rise of neoliberalism. Kelly Lytle Hernández’s chapter documents the historical significance of the imprisonment of magonistas to unveil the historical dynamics of Mexican imprisonment in the United States. She argues that the suppression of magonista resistance and the Mexican Revolution, more broadly, illustrates the role played by Mexican and U.S. governments in incarcerating Mexicans along the border regions of the Sunbelt. The last essay in this section by George T. Díaz examines the resistance of Mexicans imprisoned in Texas in the early half of the 20th century. Díaz argues that Mexican prisoners remained resilient in the face of harsh conditions through cultural practices.
Part II investigates the intersections between gender, race, labor, and citizenship during the Jim Crow era. Talitha L. Leflouria’s contribution details the role of post–Civil War carceral regimes in controlling the reproduction of African American women. Similar to Leflouria’s chapter, Pippa Holloway highlights women’s experiences with disenfranchisement and incarceration. Holloway examines the experiences of incarcerated women in the U.S. Sunbelt in the first half of the 20th century. This chapter is suited for readers interested in the roots of voter disenfranchisement of women prisoners. Next, Vivien Miller investigates the histories of chain gangs and road prisons in Florida to illustrate how carceral experiences are reinvented over time. Miller shows how the road prison in the latter half of the 20th century continued the chain gang’s legacy of modernizing prisons in the Jim Crow South.
Part III explores how the Sunbelt fueled the turn toward mass incarceration with prison privatization, the War on Drugs, super-maximum prisons, and prison gang warfare. Heather McCarty examines the interaction between external factors such as social movements and tough-on-crime political rhetoric with factors internal to prisons such as overcrowding, changing prisoner demographics, and prison administrative response strategies and how it fueled the rise of prison gangs. Then, Volker Janseesn argues that the Sunbelt has played a central role, not only in the United States, but in the styles of punishment globally. As Janseesn states, “Private prisons no longer just warehouse an American surplus labor force but increasingly those of the Global South—be it in immigration facilities or private prisons in Central America and Africa” (p. 296). Karamet Reiter—through oral history interviews with prison administrators, lawyers, prison architects, and former prisoners—examines the origins of super-maximum prisons. Reiter argues that correctional bureaucrats, not politicians, were responsible for making the final design decisions for the original supermax prisons. Ending the third section of this volume, Donna Murch examines Hillary and Bill Clinton’s role in the expansion of the carceral system of the United States. Murch shows how, despite African American support for the Clintons and the Democratic Party more broadly, the left party of the United States has taken actions that have been essential to building a system of mass incarceration.
Part IV concludes the volume with essays that offer visibility to prisoners whose resistance are typically erased. Dan Berger’s essay on George Jackson reveals the complex image of his legacy, investigating Jackson as a person as well as a memory. Berger examines Jackson’s impact on prison abolition movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Douglas K. Miller’s essay builds on Kelly Lytle Hernandez’s work on Indigenous incarceration in 19th-century California. Miller provides a spatially and temporally broader examination of the links between contemporary mass incarceration and settler-colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. Miller contends that the settler-colonial past of the United States has cleared the path for contemporary forms of settler-colonial violence, including the mass incarceration of Native Americans.
This collection of essays masterfully organizes important contributions to the scholarship on the carceral state. Each essay connects to the next in a logical and purposeful way. Authors expand each other’s arguments, creating well-connected theses analyzing the foundations and interconnections of carceral networks in the United States. This volume makes an impactful addition to the study of crimmigration and the carceral state. Readers interested in the intersections between racism, incarceration, immigration detention and deportation, and settler-colonial violence will find what they are looking for within this well-crafted anthology. Instructors would find great use for this text in graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses.
