The Constitution Free Zone in the United States: Law and Life in a State of Carcelment

Abstract

Residents of South Texas live in a “Constitution free zone,” as one of our informants explained. Court rulings have declared that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution does not apply at checkpoints and spaces up to 100 miles north of the U.S.‐Mexican border. This article draws upon Agamben's arguments about “states of exception” and Foucault's notion of the “carceral state” to show that border residents live in a state of legal exception, in which the modalities characteristic of mass incarceration are extended from prison, where search and seizure is always classified as “reasonable,” into everyday life. We introduce the concept “state of carcelment” to describe how these modalities operate on the ground, through mass incarceration and internal checkpoints, to inter, so to speak, an entire region. With the potential diffusion of this “state of carcelment” beyond the border region, anthropologists are poised to critically engage its legal and cultural normalization. [State of exception, border security, Mexican American, Constitution free zone, prisons, checkpoints, race, gender, carcelment]