Deportability and the Carceral State

Bibliographic Data

ID5705345
AuthorsThomas R Hester (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels, corresponding author), T Hester
Year2015
Volume102
Issue1
Pages141-151
Publication date2015-06-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jav230
OpenAlexW2271372716
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited2

Unlawfully entering the United States after a deportation is a felony.Remaining in the United States after the expiration of a visa is a felony.Passing a bad check when undocumented is an aggravated felony.Each punishable by at least one year in prison, these immigration-related crimes today constitute the leading cause of imprisonment in the federal penal system.Drug offenders, in other words, no longer constitute the majority of federal prisoners.Over the past decade, immigration offenders have consistently equaled or outnumbered drug offenders in the federal penal system, although the margin is relatively slight.In 2011, for example, drug offenders made up 29.1 percent of all federal convictions compared to immigration offenders who represented 34.9 percent of all convictions.Together, however, immigration and drug offenders were the majority of all prisoners in the federal penal system, making both immigration control and the war on drugs cornerstones of the carceral state. 1 Scholars of the carceral state have published numerous analyses of the war on drugs, but far fewer have examined when, why, and how immigration control became a cornerstone of the carceral state.Since the 1880s, in the name of immigration control, the federal government has deported more than 50 million people.By detailing the creation and expansion of deportability (the legal condition of being deportable) and the stunning number of deportations since the late nineteenth century, this essay provides a brief history of how immigration control emerged as a leading cause of incarceration in the United States.It focuses on deportation because more than 75 percent of immigration offenders are unauthorized immigrants sentenced to prison for entering the United States without inspection or for overstaying an immigrant visa.U.S. federal prisons, therefore, are filling up with deportees

Criminology · Programming language · Sociology · State (computer science · Computer Science · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · History · Legal Systems and Judicial Processes · Torture, Ethics, and Law

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