Spaces Of Detention Research Articles

The Hospitality of Cyberspace: Mobilizing Asylum Seeker Testimony Online

This article focuses on maritime voyages filmed and narrated by asylum seekers, where they become “produsers” of their own testimonial narratives that are then disseminated through both conventional and new media. Social media offers new venues and opportunities for the dissemination of testimony generated by the asylum seekers, from within the boats, trucks, and planes that transport them. Asylum seekers are not citizens seeking democracy in the public spaces of their own homelands; on the contrary, they are stigmatized as the barbarians at our gates, and as a threat to the security of the nation. In their hands, however, smartphones and social media enable new forms of testimonial narrative, from within spaces of detention. Can we speak of the hospitality of cyberspace on behalf of the dispossessed?

Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador

Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador

A healthy island blue space: From space of detention to site of sanctuary

Island blue spaces are associated with restorative potential, but few studies examine this proposition when an island׳s use has changed over time. We examine Rotoroa Island (near Auckland, New Zealand) where, for almost a century, the Salvation Army ran an alcohol treatment facility. The island׳s relative isolation was central to its mixed therapeutic and carceral roles. Following change in treatment ideologies, the facility closed in 2005. It subsequently re-opened as a reserve for recreation, remembrance and environmental restoration. Our analysis focuses on the enabling resources at Rotoroa across these two eras, in the context of different constructions of healthy island blue space.

Research and Application on Technology of Flood-Storage and Flood-Detention of Coal Mining Subsidence Area of Suzhou Coal Mine

The artical is based on the investigation of the basis of the status quo of Zhuxianzhuang and Luling coal mining subsidence area in Anhui province Suzhou city(hereinafter referred to as the "Zhu Lu subsidence area"), a preliminary analysis of the dynamic change trend of detention space in Zhu Lu subsidence area, and based on the hysteresis storage conditions of subsidence area, use the flood routing model to simulate the hysteresis effect of storage at different subsidence scenarios of different frequency flood. Finally, using the experience type channel evolution model and peak delay routing model further revealed storage effect on flood process of Zhu Lu subsidence area.

Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador - by Zilberg, Elana

Bulletin of Latin American ResearchVolume 33, Issue 1 p. 116-117 Book Review Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador - by Zilberg, Elana Benedict Hayes, Benedict Hayes Independent ResearcherSearch for more papers by this author Benedict Hayes, Benedict Hayes Independent ResearcherSearch for more papers by this author First published: 05 December 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12139Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume33, Issue1January 2014Pages 116-117 RelatedInformation

Space of Detention. By ElanaZilberg. NC: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 360, $24.95.

Space of Detention. By ElanaZilberg. NC: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 360, $24.95.

Space of detention: The making of a transnational gang crisis between Los Angeles and El Salvador . By Elana Zilberg.

Space of detention: The making of a transnational gang crisis between Los Angeles and El Salvador . By Elana Zilberg.

Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador by Elana Zilberg (review)

Reviewed by: Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador by Elana Zilberg Ellen Moodie Elana Zilberg, Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 360 pp. “I don’t do gangs,” Elana Zilberg used to say, almost plaintively, to fans who approached her after one of her many eloquent conference presentations on Salvadoran youth and migration. Nonetheless, like Philippe Bourgois and crack in 1980s Spanish Harlem, she ended up “forced into [gangs] against [her] will” (1996:1). Also like Bourgois, she has written a riveting account of how (mostly) young men become discarded in the context of another economic and political transition. Perhaps unlike Bourgois, however, she remains a reluctant ethnographer, uncomfortable representing Weasel, Gato, Sleepy, and other members and former members of gangs such as La Mara Salvatrucha (MS or MS-13) and the 18th Street Gang. Hence, readers may not find the expected account of la vida loca (the crazy life) in Space of Detention—but most will undoubtedly finish this beautifully written book with an intimate understanding of the capillaries of millennial capitalism and US-American Empire. Bourgois did worry about how to render marginalized young New York Puerto Ricans in his In Search of Respect, not wanting to reiterate damaging stereotypes, but also refusing to sanitize “the suffering and destruction that exists on inner-city streets” (1996:12). Zilberg, who turned to anthropology after years as a Los Angeles-based immigration advocate and activist during El Salvador’s civil war, expresses similar anxiety. She laments the “excited and frenetic” action-movie style of many documentaries (226), and wonders if academics and activists have unwittingly contributed to the production of a “transnational gang crisis” (236–237). For her part, she examines how the US and El Salvador are linked through neoliberal “securityscapes,” a concept she updates as “patterns of circulation that [End Page 325] result from the effort of states and police to control the mobility of subjects considered to be dangerous, in this case gang youth and immigrants” (3). Again like Bourgois, Zilberg accepts that criminalized youth can be agents in their own “demonization.” She, too, is interested in the structures that trap them. She is concerned with “the power of law and law enforcement in producing and reproducing crime” (9). Ultimately, she explores a discursive “gang-crime-terrorism continuum” that chokes hope for stigmatized youth across the Americas. Law’s transnational mobility propels much of the action in this book. Versions of zero-tolerance and the USA Patriot Act flow between the US and El Salvador, as imaginaries of terrorist Others become as flexible as ideal-type postindustrial workers, all in the service of capital. Following trajectories of law, discourse, and human beings, Zilberg situates the first half of the book in Los Angeles, the second in San Salvador. The sites inevitably bleed into each other. Take one of the earliest moments in the book, the 1992 LA riots, which exploded after four police officers were acquitted of beating motorist Rodney King despite video of the incident. Zilberg reminds us that in the courtroom, the police defense played up Rodney King’s dangerous mobility, depicting him as “hyperactive and subversively mobile,” speeding in his car and then refusing to be still while cops thrashed him (63). Then she shows us how this same kind of transgressive mobility was hitched to figures featured in media coverage of the riots: Latino looters frequently (rightly or not) portrayed as undocumented Salvadorans—many of whom had fled civil war at home. Zilberg argues that such visions have helped drive wars on crime and immigrants (a process that has only intensified post-9/11). Anti-immigrant and anti-crime initiatives followed the riots (California’s Propositions 184 and 187), key parts of which found their way into two 1996 federal laws: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Beholden to a neoliberal notion of the “responsibilization” of the individual, these acts turn even a nonviolent crime such as a DUI into an “aggravated felony.” Applied retroactively, and often...

Book review: Susan A Phillips, Operation Fly Trap: L.A. Gangs, Drugs, and the Law and Elana Zilberg, Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador

Book review: Susan A Phillips, Operation Fly Trap: L.A. Gangs, Drugs, and the Law and Elana Zilberg, Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador

Elana Zilberg, Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, $24.95). Pp. 344. isbn978 0 8223 4730 9.

Elana Zilberg, Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, $24.95). Pp. 344. isbn978 0 8223 4730 9. - Volume 47 Issue 1

Spaces of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (review)

Reviewed by: Spaces of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador Joseph L. Scarpaci Spaces of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Elana Zilberg. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. 360 pp., notes, appendices, and index. $24.95 paperback (ISBN 978-0-8223-4730-9) Brown-skin street gangs such as La Mara Salvatrucha, images of Latino looters, and the spread of urban 'securityscapes' have gripped the imagination and media attention of news outlets. Politicians Dick Cheney, New Gingrich, and a handful of southwestern U.S. governors and sheriffs promulgated those images to the American public for several decades. This is the context that anthropologist and Associate Director for Global California Studies at the University of California, San Diego, Elana Zilberg, captures from both a 'macro' and 'micro' perspective. In broad strokes, she tells the story about how the U.S. government's experience in low-intensity warfare from Korea and Vietnam were used as local government proxies in El Salvador. At the local level, gangs emerged there and in the U.S. as the result of uneven development between Latin America and the United States where tensions have been negotiated from 'above' (governments, corporations) and 'below' (immigrants, youth, women, and grassroots organization). In turn, gangs become the lens through which these newly created securityscapes are understood. This book is not a romantic West Side Story of irreverent youth coping with the American 'melting pot.' Rather, when El Salvadoran civil strife ended in 1992, broad structural reforms heavily promoted market capitalism. El Salvador's rural oligarchy was weakened, food imports rose, and even beans and rice had to reach the Central American nation by containers leaving ports in the United States. Although land reform was a post-war 'benefit,' little technical assistance was available, and out-migration ensued. Accordingly, the book examines "the current obsession with the so-called transnational youth gang [End Page 211] crisis from the vantage point of the political history that constitutes the very ground that obsession works to obscure: namely, the ongoing participation of the United States in the production and reproduction of violence in El Salvador... the contemporary gang crisis [is]...a product of long-standing regional political structure and pattern between Latin America and the United States" (2). However, the author contends that "neither gangs nor immigrants are ultimately the objects of this study. Rather, they are the lens through which I examine the production and contestation over the contemporary manifestation of long-standing 'securityscapes' through and in which both the United States and El Salvador are linked and complicit" (3). Eight chapters and an epilogue (most of the field work ends around 2007) constitute three parts of the book: 'Los Angeles,' 'San Salvador,' and 'A disturbance in Time and Space.' Geographers who wrestle with linking different scales of analysis (local, regional, national, and global) will appreciate the author's painstaking efforts to interpret her decade-long tracking of gang members from Los Angeles to El Salvador, and in some cases, back again. At times, the political theoretical interpretation of gangs viewed through the lenses of Foucault, Lefebvre, and others becomes opaque and jargon-laden. At other times, the experiences of her key informants are insightful and even amusing. Witness the case of Weasel, who after 20 years in the United States is deported back to San Salvador for minor infractions in Los Angeles. He flaunts a garish-dyed Mohawk haircut to match his role as an alien Martian in the country in which he was born. Weasel's English, though, is much better than his Spanish. His tale, like those of other subjects in the book, shows how state agencies use discipline to impose structure on the poor, and how the triad of gangs, terrorism, and immigrants becomes conflated in the same narrative. Newt Gingrich's 2005 documentary "American Gangs," produced and aired by Fox News, captures this mélange by superimposing images of jihadists running through a Middle Eastern dessert, and brown-skin people crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. Other alarmist reportage such as the killing of Brenda Paz, an FBI informant whose body...

Bordering solidarities: migrant activism and the politics of movement and camps at Calais

The proliferation of more restrictive border controls governing global mobility provides important sites of crystallization through which differentiated and stratified rights to movement are produced, negotiated, and reimagined. One such form, the detention of migrants, is often understood through a logic of exception as the exclusion of unwanted migrants from the borders of the political community. Critical scholarship on detention informed by an autonomous migration perspective suggests a more nuanced reading of detention as the differential inclusion of migrants through positions of precariousness, transformations of legal statuses and subjectivities, and control over the direction and temporality of migratory flows. Building on this trajectory, this paper argues that the very meaning of the camp also needs to be brought into the analysis of a politics of migration and of control. For spaces of detention are sites of contestation that can be used by migrants (and those in solidarity with them) as resources to navigate border controls, reimagine political community and subjectivities and through which migrants engage in practices of citizenship. Reflecting on the destruction of the migrant camps in and around Calais, the paper examines three different images of the camp space known as ‘the jungle’ and draws attention to camp spaces as social and political spaces, in which the struggles to define them are an integral part of what is at stake in the struggle between a politics of control and a politics of migration.

‘These People Could Be Anyone’: Fear, Contempt (and Empathy) in a British Immigration Removal Centre

Detention is proliferating as a governmental response to human mobility in the ‘war on terror’. Theoretical engagements with spaces of detention and enclosure have been influenced by Agamben's work on the camp and the sovereign exception. Such a view focuses on the abject ‘bare life’ that is produced by the sovereign decision. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among staff at a UK immigration removal centre, the paper makes the case for ‘going inside’ the detention centre. It examines the everyday life of detention through the lens of emotion, with a focus on fear and contempt. Exploring these emotions as forms of judgement or construal can unravel staff dispositions towards the detainees, and can demonstrate the ways in which emotion shapes the treatment the detainees receive. The paper argues for emotion as an analytical tool; in the case of detention, it can supplement abstract accounts of ‘the camp’.

“The Only Thing they have to Bargain with is their own Self”: masculinity and protesting immigration detention

This paper explores questions around masculinity and immigration detention. It suggests that masculinity constitutes a dimension present in both the rationale for incarcerating unauthorised asylum seekers and in practices of resistance against their incarceration. In modern Australia, the enclosed spaces of immigration detention are sites of bitter struggle. Brutality permeates the detention space and all detainees are vulnerable to its permutations, but men are the principal targets of the detention regime and are typically the primary instigators of mass demonstrations. Group protests are a response to the constraining system of incarceration and seek particular resolution. In this masculine space a form of male resistance has publicised the devastation of detention.

Reinventing Immigration Law Enforcement in the Southern District of California

For two or more generations, more than 50% of those who attempted to enter the United States illegally did so through the Southern District of California. Each year, up to 600,000 arrests were made here at a porous and largely unguarded border. Most of those arrested were economic migrants. Several thousand, however, were criminal aliens. Seemingly without exception, those who were apprehended provided false names and identification documents to Border Patrol and INS Agents, who often had no way to determine quickly the true identity and criminal background of the arrestee. Adding to these challenges was the fact that the Southern District of California was home to only one federal jail?the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in downtown San Diego. Built to house 456 inmates in 1974 (a capacity later expanded to 607), by 1994, the MCC routinely housed 1200 or more. 72% of the inmates were not U.S. citizens. For years, misdemeanor prosecutions, princi pally for violation of the U.S. Immigration Code, outpaced felony prosecutions in this District by a ratio of 5 to 1. Given limited detention space, misdemeanor prosecutions were preferred?they moved through the system quickly, making limited bed space available for the next misdemeanant. The fact remained, however, that even 5,000 such misdemeanor prosecutions were a de minimis drop in the bucket?595,000 illegal entrants still faced no sanction. It was clear that misdemeanor prosecu tions, even by the thousands, did nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigration. Since each illegal entrant violates federal criminal law merely by entering the United States, it was readily apparent that we could not, even were it deemed desirable, arrest, prosecute, and convict a half million or more people annually. In order to regain control of and reinstitute the rule of law at the border, it was clear that the Govern ment needed to: (1) provide the Border Patrol and INS with the personnel, equipment, and technology required to reduce illegal immigration in the first instance; (2) focus our prosecutorial attention on alien smugglers and on those undocumented aliens who are linked directly to violence and crime in the community; (3) impose an administrative, rather than a criminal, sanction against first-time violators of our immigration laws by expanding the use of the U.S. Immigration Courts; and (4) develop a credible and effective policy of worksite enforcement to discourage U.S. employers from hiring illegal entrants.