American Incarceration Research Articles

Nature behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration. By Connie Y. Chiang

<i>Nature behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration</i>. By Connie Y. Chiang

The Poetics of Consolation: Japanese Aesthetics and American Incarceration

The Poetics of Consolation: Japanese Aesthetics and American Incarceration

Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality

The American incarceration rate, though recently stabilized, increased rapidly over the past half century. Today, compared with the 1970s, more than five times as many people spend time in prison annually (National Research Council [2014][1]; Wakefield and Uggen [2010][2]). The historically

The Japanese American wartime incarceration: Examining the scope of racial trauma.

Ten weeks after the 1941 Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the U.S. government authorized the removal of more than 110,000 Japanese American men, women, and children from their homes in Western portions of the country to incarceration camps in desolate areas of the United States. The mass incarceration was portrayed as necessary to protect the country from potential acts of espionage or sabotage that might be committed by someone of Japanese ancestry. However, an extensive government review initiated in 1980 found no evidence of military necessity to support the removal decision and concluded that the incarceration was a grave injustice fueled by racism and war hysteria. The Japanese American wartime experience represents a powerful case example of race-based historical trauma. This article describes the consequences of the incarceration for Japanese Americans during and after their unjust imprisonment, their coping responses and healing strategies, as well as the impacts of receiving governmental redress more than four decades after the war's end. Examination of this specific event provides a perspective for understanding the long-term, radiating effects of racial trauma and the process of healing, over a broad arc of time and across social contexts. Current relevance of the Japanese American incarceration and implications for the field of psychology are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The Interaction of Race and Gender as a Significant Driver of Racial Arrest Disparities for African American Men.

The mass incarceration of African Americans is both a driver of racial health inequalities in the USA. Systemic social biases which associate African American men with criminality, violence, and as a particular threat to white women may partially explain their over-representation in the criminal justice system. We combined data from the Washington, DC Metro Police Department (MPD) and the American Community Survey to test whether neighborhood-level gender, race, and economic makeup were associated with elevated drug-related arrest disproportions for African American men. We found that African American men were significantly overrepresented in all drug-related arrests across the District, and that this arrest disproportion was significantly higher in neighborhoods that had a higher percentage of white female residents. The association between race and gender was somewhat attenuated, but not completely eliminated, when we introduced socio-economic variables to our model. Addressing the social determinants of criminal justice disparities must account for the intersection of race, gender, and economics, rather than considering race in isolation.

Review: Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II by Anne M. Blankenship

Book Review| November 01 2018 Review: Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II by Anne M. Blankenship Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II. By Anne M. Blankenship. (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xi + 298 pp.) Justin K.H. Tse Justin K.H. Tse Northwestern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2018) 87 (4): 711–712. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2018.87.4.711 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Justin K.H. Tse; Review: Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II by Anne M. Blankenship. Pacific Historical Review 1 November 2018; 87 (4): 711–712. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2018.87.4.711 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Dissonant memories of Japanese American incarceration

ABSTRACTMemories of the Japanese American Incarceration Camps during WWII vary widely across America. For some, memories of the incarceration are a focal point of their identity and a driver of political action. Others who underwent this imprisonment choose not to recall their experiences. Incarceration can haunt their descendants as an ever-present but silenced past. Broadly, the United States’ relationship to this past is fractured. Activists invoke the incarceration as an affront to American values. As recently as 2017, politicians recall it as precedent for immigration bans and proposed legislation for the incarceration of minority groups. For many, it is not remembered at all, left out of the master narrative of American history. In this article, I discuss the dissonant memorialisations associated with seven detention facilities, key components to the infrastructure of mass removal and incarceration. Archaeology must actively engage with such uneven terrains of memory.

Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the Demise of Civil Liberties

Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the Demise of Civil Liberties

Bayonets in Paradise: Martial Law in Hawai'i During World War II

Justice Frank Murphy once wrote that two aspects of World War II could only be forgotten at our peril. One was the indiscriminate incarceration of Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans. The other was 4 years of martial law in Hawai'i. We have cried “Never Again” to the first but forgotten the second. Therefore, it is at long last that the legal scholars Harry and Jane Scheiber have excavated why and how an unprecedented military rule occurred and how stubbornly it clung to power.

Foundations for a New World Order: Uniting Protestant Worship during the World War II Japanese American Incarceration

During the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, visions of a peaceful new world order led mainline Protestants to manipulate the worship practices of incarcerated Japanese Americans ( Nikkei) to strengthen unity of the church and nation. Ecumenical leaders saw possibilities within the chaos of incarceration and war to improve themselves, their church, and the world through these experiments based on ideals of Protestant ecumenism and desires for racial equality and integration. This essay explores why agendas that restricted the autonomy of racial minorities were doomed to fail and how Protestants can learn from this experience to expand their definition of unity to include pluralist representations of Christianity and America as imagined by different sects and ethnic groups.

“Caught Between Two Worlds”: Asian American Elementary Teachers’ Enactment of Asian American History

Traditional narratives of U.S. history largely exclude Asian American histories, particularly at the elementary level. This qualitative case study examines how three Asian American elementary school teachers included Asian American histories in their social studies curriculum and scaffolded student understanding by sharing their own hybrid identities and experiences. The teachers (re)framed the purpose of the historical narrative and confronted the dominant narrative of Japanese American incarceration, while making connections between Japanese American incarceration and contemporary events. Through this work, the teachers illustrated the complexity of race in the United States and presented discrimination and racism as enduring issues worthy of discussion with young learners.

Anne M.Blankenship. Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016

Anne M.Blankenship. Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016

Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II. By Anne M. Blankenship. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 296 pp. $29.95 paper.

Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II. By Anne M. Blankenship. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 296 pp. $29.95 paper.

On Japanese American Remembrance and the Liberal Limits of Dissenting Citizenship

On Japanese American Remembrance and the Liberal Limits of Dissenting Citizenship Doug S. Ishii (bio) Then They Came for Me: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties, Alphawood Gallery, Chicago, June 29to November 19, 2017. Growing up yonseiin an all-American, Japanese American family, I was raised with stories about the segregated 442nd Infantry Regiment: a group of men who sustained high casualty rates to prove their loyalty to a country that incarcerated them based on their race. Their ranks included my grandfather. My other grandfather proved his American identity through language, as part of the Counter Intelligence Corps. This story of military service is not the only story that the Alphawood Gallery, in a partnership with the Japanese American Service Committee (JASC), tells in Then They Came for Me—a visual exhibit that used images and objects, largely culled from Richard Cahan and Michael Williams's Un-American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II: Images by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Other Government Photographers(2016) and the archives and collections of the JASC Legacy Center, and a robust roster of multidisciplinary programming, to educate about Executive Order 9066 and its relevance for the Era of 45. On October 22, in one such Alphawood-sponsored program, I and a dear colleague watched the stage recording of the musical inspired by George Takei's World War II incarceration experience, Allegiance(2015). In the penultimate number of act 1, the woman protagonist Keiko and Frankie, whose name recalls Frank Emi of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, go to the dance in the camp's mess hall. Frankie leads the show's exuberant number "Paradise," with the refrain "Put up and shut up, 'cuz you're in Paradise!"—which inspires many of the attendees, including Keiko, to direct actions, such as draft resistance and the covert circulation of radical criticism. Through one of Allegiance's three competing story lines, the sympathetic portrayal of Keiko and Frankie reframes the postincarceration narrative through what Sunaina Maira calls dissenting [End Page 335]citizenship: "an engagement with the nation-state that is based on a critique of its politics and not automatically or always in compliance with state policies" that also "encapsulates the contradictions of challenging the state while seeking inclusion within it." 1To bring these two incarceration narratives together, this transition in political perspective, from one of assimilative citizenship through combat to one of a dissenting citizenship that questions the distribution of rights, reflects the paradigm shift in which Then They Came for Meparticipates. Then They Came for Memobilizes cultural institutions for the public good as part of ongoing but easily ignored social justice organizing in the Midwest. But, for the exhibition's concluding weekend on November 13, the Alphawood Gallery brought together the performer Arish Singh; the noted Asian American activist Helen Zia, who entered the spotlight during the trial of Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz for the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin; and Serve 2 Unite's Pardeep Kaleka, whose father was murdered in the 2012 Oak Creek Massacre, for a discussion, "Hate Crimes: From Vincent Chin to the Present." In his comments, Kaleka opined, "sometimes we get so tied into the explanation of things . . . how do we get people to feel again?" In this political climate in which empathy for the aggrieved seems like a minimal goal, feelings matter; but, as disaster, endless war, and the militarization and privatization of everyday life illustrate the failures of the racist nation-state, feeling feels like a cop-out. These affective politics reflect Rebecca Wanzo's theorizing of sympathetic storytelling, a political form characterized by progress narratives, suffering hierarchies that occur amid the homogenization of suffering, the privileging of therapeutic intimacy, and the disqualification of some people's pain. 2The exhibit's humanization of Japanese Americans' racializing suffering by the state that supposedly would prevent such suffering engages what Lisa Lowe has called "the economy of affirmation and forgetting," in which "liberal affirmations of individualism, civility, mobility, and free enterprise simultaneously innovate new means and forms of subjection, administration, and governance." 3Restrained by liberal citizenship, Then They Came for...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara, Editor This issue begins with Kandice Chuh's presidential address delivered at the ASA annual meeting in Chicago in November 2017. In the face of a wide range of attacks on academic freedom nationally and globally, Chuh asks us to deliberate responses to the current scene, not by defending academic freedom but first by tracing the longue durée of the principle originating in professionalization of the academy with its underpinning liberal ideology and US nationalism. She further reminds us of the conceptions of the autonomous rights-bearing citizen that shape the understanding of academic freedom, which has then been deployed against the interrogation of racism and settler colonialism in the name of civility. She calls on us, as an association, to unlearn the inherited ways of knowing and being and to practice the year's conference theme, "a pedagogy of dissent": "an organized approach to un/learning grounded in the world and founded in generosity and compassion, understood to be essential to social transformation." In response, Soo Ah Kwon reflects on the ways in which our own professional labor in universities is often implicated in the logic of liberal academic freedom and its neoliberal products—for instance, in our advocacy for institutional diversity that is devoid of political and structural inquiry into inequality and injustice. She reminds us of the need for a relentless critique of our profession, its governing logic, and our relationship to universities as our workplace. Jodi Melamed uses Chuh's address to situate US higher education in the context of the proliferation of rights-based forms of racial and colonial capitalist violence in the name of the common good. Discussing how the ASA itself has been a very site of such contestations, she asks us to contemplate the kinds and forms of "thick relationality" that would form pedagogies of collective action in our own association. Four essays address various modes of temporalities and spatialities in the way the world is captured by artists, writers, and critics. Frances Tran's elegant essay, "Time Traveling with Care: On Female Coolies and Archival Speculations," approaches the history of the coolie trade and the figure of the female coolie using the science fiction trope of time travel, proposing an affective and aesthetic practice with the archive that does not aim to reproduce mastery or establish subjects as knowable entities. In "Appraisal Narratives: Reading Race on the Midcentury Block," Adrienne Brown problematizes another set of archives—narratives of residential segregation in literary fiction, forms, manuals, maps, and urban reportage—to illustrate how idioms of perception, value, and taste undergirding home ownership and neighborhood value in the United [End Page vii] States have been organized by race. Brandon Webb's "Laughter Louder Than Bombs? Apocalyptic Graphic Satire in Cold War Cartooning, 1946–1959" examines the left-liberal divide in the works of the nation's leading syndicated cartoonists, Herbert Block and Jules Feiffer, to argue that satirizing the contradictions of the nuclear era meant questioning the basic assumptions of the Cold War rivalry and breaking from the consensus framework. Simon Willmetts's "Digital Dystopia: Surveillance, Autonomy, and Social Justice in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story" analyzes the question of autonomy in Shteyngart's novel to argue for personhood presented in the dystopian genre that is socially embedded and politically engaged, and a necessary but insufficient precondition for the resistance and refusal of digital mass surveillance. The issue carries four book reviews on topics that are all the more relevant in our times. Joseph Stuart reviews five books on racial formation and the civil rights movement. Rebecca Hill discusses works on the history of political culture and the shaping of public opinion and discourse. The three books reviewed by Benjamin Medeiros take up the political and cultural battles over free speech on college campuses. Christopher Perreira discusses three books that deal with the cultures and logics of the carceral state and settler colonialism. In the Event Review, Doug Ishii discusses the exhibit on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II at Alphawood Gallery in Chicago. The social impact game Survivance—which takes its name from Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor's term that...

Apology and Commemoration: Memorializing the World War II Japanese American Incarceration at the Tanforan Assembly Center

Apology and Commemoration: Memorializing the World War II Japanese American Incarceration at the Tanforan Assembly Center

City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 by Kelly Lytle Hernandez

Reviewed by: City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 by Kelly Lytle Hernandez Natalia Molina CITY OF INMATES: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. By Kelly Lytle Hernandez. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2017. Lytle Hernandez's Cities of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles is a study of the rise of imprisonment, broadly speaking, and the [End Page 124] buildup of Los Angeles's prison system, which by 1950 was the largest of any US city. The book makes significant contributions to US history, urban history, the study of race and ethnicity, and carceral history. Incarceration is foundational to Los Angeles; the city was literally built by convict labor, which was perfectly legal under the Thirteenth Amendment's dual provisions of ending black slavery while allowing the use of unfree labor as criminal punishment. As a scholar exploring race as a relational concept, I am fascinated by Lytle Hernandez's account of how the history of incarceration affected racialized groups differently over time—and how the development of Los Angeles remains, in the aggregate, a story about power, domination, and race. Each chapter unfolds a story that explains how the carceral complex in Los Angeles expanded and shape-shifted in order to control whichever population had resources of labor or land that were needed at the time. The book spans three centuries, examining the workings of imprisonment at different historical moments, including Native American imprisonment beginning in the 1700s, immigrant detention of Chinese and moral panics over homeless white men in the late 1800s, the first cases of Mexican imprisonment and their connection to the Mexican Revolution, the growth and entrenchment of Mexican incarceration in the 1920s and 30s, and its overlap with the origins of black incarceration in the city. Starting with the first prison established during the founding of Los Angeles, and connecting the histories and experiences of racialized groups not traditionally examined together (including Native Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, blacks, and poor whites), Lytle Hernandez deftly demonstrates that imprisonment is much more than punishment—it is also a way of subjugating, plundering, and even disappearing groups not part of the settler colonial ruling class. Scholars have traditionally studied these histories separately, grouping them by time period, by distinct racial and ethnic groups, or by forms of imprisonment (convict leasing, immigrant detention). Lytle Hernandez's interdisciplinary approach, however, makes a compelling argument that they should be examined together, as all fall within the rubric she terms "caging" and the long history of white settler colonialism. Reading this book at times felt like stepping through the looking glass. Through her painstaking research and capacious theoretical framework, Lytle Hernandez has an uncanny ability to take what we think we know and turn it on its head. The story of Los Angeles, for instance, is commonly told as one of four distinct time periods with little connection made between them: indigenous society, Spanish conquest, the Mexican period, and the US conquest in 1848. Using her carceral lens, Lytle Hernandez fills in those gaps, demonstrating how legal systems in one period were transferred to the next in ways that kept the racial hierarchy of the region intact. For example, the use of public order charges (e.g. vagrancy laws) during the Mexican period (1810–21) solidified the control and racialization of the indigenous population that begun decades earlier, while expanding that control to include Africans, mulattos, and mesitzos. As these populations were racialized and marked as unworthy of citizenship, the category of "criminal" was neatly mapped onto the racial categories of the time. Under American rule, these same vagrancy laws increasingly justified a captive native population who could be auctioned to the highest bidder or used for work on a chain gang. That this all occurred in California, a supposedly free state, is staggering. By connecting the time periods, a unique move, Lytle Hernandez uses a wide lens to demonstrate how the creation and enforcement of laws through policing and imprisonment was central not just for the policing of racialized and landless groups, but also for the...

Anne M. Blankenship. Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II.

Anne M. Blankenship. Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II.

Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II. By Anne M. Blankenship

In January 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt argued that everyone should enjoy four fundamental freedoms, one of which was freedom of worship. How did this freedom operate in the unfree Japanese American incarceration camps? Anne Blankenship addresses this paradox in her important new book. Focusing on Quakers, Roman Catholics, and mainline Protestants, she explores how white Christian leaders and Nikkei Christians navigated a wartime conundrum: “confront the government during a time of national crisis or stand aside as the injustice unfolded” (p. 2). This dilemma was significant, as incarceration threatened American and Christian values of equality, tolerance, and pluralism. Blankenship shows that Christians responded in different ways, which reflected “shifting understandings of race and diversity within mid-twentieth century liberal Christianity” (p. 4). Blankenship opens her study by examining white church leaders’ responses to Pearl Harbor and Executive Order 9066. Although many religious groups defended Nikkei loyalty, they avoided publicly denouncing the government or fighting incarceration. Quakers were the notable exception. Their “definitive condemnation of the incarceration” and their desire to restore Nikkei’s civil rights “set them apart from other Christian denominations” (p. 18). Nonetheless, many Christians provided support, from resettlement aid to worship services. Whereas Quakers focused on the former, Protestants devoted energy to the latter and advocated the formation of ecumenical churches that promoted a unified Christianity.

Of Coercion and Accommodation: Looking at Japanese American Imprisonment through a Law Office Window

Crucial to the implementation of the War Relocation Authority's (WRA) regulations of its detention camps for the uprooted Japanese American community of the West Coast were the WRA “project attorneys,” white lawyers stationed in the camps who gave legal advice to administrators and internees alike. These lawyers left behind a voluminous correspondence that opens a new window on the WRA's relationship with its prisoners, a relationship heretofore understood as encompassing coercion on one side and either compliance or resistance on the other. This article uses the voluminous correspondence of the project attorney at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming as a new lens for viewing the regulatory relationship between the WRA and the imprisoned community. It focuses on three of the many matters about which the project attorney gave advice: the design of the camp's community government, its criminal justice system, and its business enterprises. Evidence from this one law office suggests that on many key issues, the relationship between the WRA and the internees was marked not so much by coercion as by reciprocal accommodation, with each taking account of some of the preferences of the other. While the data are from just one of the ten WRA camps, they suggest a need to reconsider our understanding of how this American system of racial imprisonment operated.