How do we govern migration without detention?

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Immigration detention can be understood as a country’s often-indefinite incarcerations of people who have not committed any crimes but who are suspected to have broken immigration rules. Despite legal strictures that civil detention must be non-punitive, non-arbitrary, and a last resort, detention is experiencing a meteoric and global spread and normalization. While most liberal, democratic countries legislated immigration detention only as recently as the 1970s, all are now producing laws and policies to expand the legal grounds to detain.

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Scholarship is overly focussed on untangling detention’s relationships with popular perceptions connecting crime to racialized immigrants, their children, and people who ‘look like’ newcomers. Likewise, most policy solutions look to facilitate incremental reforms leading to purportedly better conditions or more releases.

 

DeCarceral Futures aims to renew and reinvigorate scholarly dialogue to get at the roots of the problem. We urgently need to dismantle detention regimes, address the conditions leading to and reinforcing the incarceration of migrants, and build a more sustainable response to global flows of people.

 

I am a co-principal investigator with Professor Sharry Aiken from Queen's University. We are now over 100 participants spanning local, national, and international levels and across scholarship, law, policymaking, and social activism. We are focussed on knowledge exchange and transfer amongst a diversity of viewpoints towards achieving racial, immigrant, and penal justice in Canada and beyond.

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The May 2019 workshop served as a catalyst for forging new research partnerships amongst scholars and policy makers across the domains of law, political studies, criminology, migration studies, and prison studies. We are producing newspaper articles, podcasts, videos, and a Blog series with students.

 

Citizenship Studies has published our special issue called Decarceral Futures: Bridging Migrant and Prison Justice towards an Abolitionist Future

 

With a brilliant range of contributors, we interrogate what a carceral abolitionism position could bring to citizenship studies, with immigration detention as the key case study. The issue provides an opportunity to probe the intersections of detention with current and potential forms of citizenship, and with the new visions of immigrant justice that would come forth with the end of detention. The contributors approach the topic from a plurality of standpoints and disciplinary backgrounds. They are variously thinking through de-funding prisons, eradicating policing, eliminating the "criminal justice" system (penal abolitionism) or doing away with all forms of containment. Spanning Asia, North America, Turkey, and Europe, the articles indicate that neither the prison nor the detention centre are inevitable in the modern, democratic order.

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Here is a link to free eprints of my editorial introduction coauthored with Prof. Sharry Aiken:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/8JQT5V3CCDZJU8AKJMNT/full?target=10.1080/13621025.2021.1890405

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Here is the Table of Contents for our issue:

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Decarceral Futures: Bridging Immigration and Prison Justice towards an Abolitionist Future

Sharry Aiken & Stephanie J. Silverman

 

 

Mutual aid as abolitionist praxis

Simone Weil Davis & Rachel Fayter

 

 

States and human immobilization: bridging the conceptual separation of slavery, immigration controls, and mass incarceration

Nandita Sharma

 

 

Crisis, capital accumulation, and the ‘Crimmigration’ fix in the aftermath of the global slump

Jessica Evans

 

 

Held at the gates of Europe: barriers to abolishing immigration detention in Turkey

Esra S. Kaytaz

 

 

Substituting immigration detention centres with ‘open prisons’ in Indonesia: alternatives to detention as the continuum of unfreedom

Antje Missbach

 

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ICE comes to Tennessee: violence work and abolition in the Appalachian South

Michelle Brown

 

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Migrant justice as reproductive justice: birthright citizenship and the politics of immigration detention for pregnant women in Canada

Salina Abji & Lindsay Larios

 

 

Immigration status and policing in Canada: current problems, activist strategies and abolitionist visions

David Moffette

 

 

Curated hostilities and the story of Abdoul Abdi: relational securitization in the settler colonial racial state

Nisha Nath