Detention System Research Articles

Health Care in US Detention Centers

The US has built the most extensive immigration detention system globally. Over the last three administrations, several organizations have noted a systemic failure in the provision of health care in detention centers, leading to the torture and death of immigrants. This essay develops the principle of the preferential option for the poor to examine the causes of deficient access to health care and solutions to overcome them. It analyzes the substandard health care in detention centers from the notion of structural violence and systematizes solutions of grassroots immigrant organizations from the idea of solidarity, understood here as a form of friendship with the poor that moves toward relational justice. Its goal is to build bridges between people so that the political will is generated to create policies to improve and enforce health care standards in detention centers and address the unjust foundations of immigration detention.

Case Study of Modular Pre-cast Concrete On-Site Stormwater Detention System during Monsoon Season in Southeast Asia

On-site stormwater detention system within a residential property is meant for an environmental protection device that temporarily stores stormwater within the property lot to mitigate flash flood, particularly during rainy seasons brought by the northeast monsoon. A field test was constructed in a house’s car porch with a 4.40 m x 4.70 m x 0.45 m tank filled with precast-concrete modular units with an effective storage volume of 3.97 m3. The system received water from a 95 m2 house roof via 0.1 m diameter pipe, discharged water via 0.05 m diameter pipe. It had recorded six observed storm events coincided with the 2019/2020 monsoon season that consisted 20–50 mm peak hourly rainfall, 0.0007–0.0018 m3 s-1 inflow, 0.0005–0.0012 m3 s-1 outflow and 0.21–0.47 m water level. Another four historical storm events coincided with the monsoon from 2015–2017 were sourced to augment the analysis. A computer model developed using the storm water management model was calibrated and verified using the six observed events. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness of fit tests between the observed and modelled cumulative distributions had produced 0.01–0.14 maximum vertical distances that were lower than the 0.41–0.68 critical values indicating close matches. As such, the calibrated and verified model was used to simulate the historical storm events with 40–50 mm peak hourly rainfall and produced 0.0010–0.0013 m3 s-1 inflow, 0.00072–0.00076 m3 s-1 outflow and 0.41–0.45 m water level. By combining the field test and computer simulation model, it was found the system was able to contain all stormwaters from northeast monsoon. However, it had a weakness which the system was approaching its maximum capacity once the peak hourly rainfall exceeded 45 mm. With such a procedure in place, improvement could be carried out.

Catchment Size to Effective Tank Volume Relationships for Individual Lot Stormwater Detention System in Malaysian Detached House

Catchment Size to Effective Tank Volume Relationships for Individual Lot Stormwater Detention System in Malaysian Detached House

Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System

Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System

Gender, Vulnerability and Everyday Resistance in Immigration Detention: Women’s Experiences of Confinement in a Portuguese Detention Facility

This paper examines immigration detention by looking at women’s experiences of confinement in a Portuguese detention facility. The empirical data—comprising participant observations, informal conversations and interviews with detained women—are read through an intersectional lens. This approach illuminates constructions of gender and sexuality in their mutual and contextualised articulation with other power relations (e.g., processes of racialisation and ethnicisation stemming from colonial histories), as well as the reconfiguration of these constructions by women themselves. Doing so also focuses on the intertwinement between power and resistance in daily life in detention. The women we met did not passively accept their situation, but rather struggled to make sense of, navigate and challenge the detention system. To this effect, they deployed multiple forms of agency, which also passed through the rejection, acceptance and reappropriation of hegemonic gendered constructions and their use in strategic ways to negotiate their positions vis-a-vis the system.

Bordering the surplus population across the Mediterranean: Imperialism and unfree labour in Libya and the Italian countryside

In spite of much emphasis on a “migration crisis” and studies on the “refugeeization” of the agricultural workforce in Italy, there is still little research on the impact of the NATO war on Libya and the militarization of EU borders in the Mediterranean on the development of labour exploitation and unfree labour in the sector. Focusing on the period between the 2007/8 global economic crisis, the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, until 2018, this article analyses the links between the system of neo-colonial extraction of Libyan resources that imposed itself after the war and the expansion of the reserve army of labour of Italian capital. We show that the militarization of EU borders further empowered militias involved in fuel, weapon and human smuggling, boosting a brutal system of detention, extortion and forced labour that both traps immigrants in Libya and pushes them towards Europe. Agri-business and retail corporations operating in Italy have benefitted from the continuing importation of energy and of vulnerable workers from Libya. The substitution of workers with immigrants with a status of asylum-seekers helps explain the diffusion of unfree labour in Italian agriculture over the last ten years. But immigrants’ experiences in Libya have also encouraged them to mobilize and reclaim their collective rights.

The plight of unaccompanied migrant minors in Greek detention system: A national and international perspective

The plight of unaccompanied migrant minors in Greek detention system: A national and international perspective

Rethinking confinement through Canada’s alternatives to detention program

This article examines Canada’s immigration and detention system through its newly established alternatives to detention (ATD) program. As a program that relies rather extensively on mobile carceral technologies such as electronic monitoring and voice reporting, I argue that we should consider these alternatives not only as extensions of carceral apparatuses and the detention system but as pervasive, far-reaching, and more abstract manifestations of control and confinement. I introduce the term “techno-carcerality” to theorize how we might understand the shift from traditional modes of confinement to less traditional ones, grounded in mobile, electronic, and digital technologies. I contend that the use of mobile carceral technologies in the context of immigration and detention imposes physical, psychological, spatial, and data-driven modes of control and confinement in private, public, and digital space, which are veiled behind notions and misconceptions of increased freedom, mobility, and autonomy. While the ATD program may offer some better options than those available within detention centers or other carceral institutions, it is a program that involves immense surveillance dataveillance techniques that lead to profound carceral effects and anxieties, affecting everyday life in ways that experientially mimic and transcend conventional confinement.

'This Is Not a Patient, This Is Property of the State': Nursing, ethics, and the immigrant detention apparatus.

This paper opens with first-hand accounts of critical care medical interventions in which detainees, in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are brought to the emergency department for treatment. This case dramatizes the extent to which the provision of ethical and acceptable nursing care is jeopardized by federal law enforcement paradigms. Drawing on the scholarship of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this paper offers a theoretical account of the power dynamics that inform the health care of patients who find themselves caught in the custodial scaffolding of a vast immigration and detention apparatus. It offers an analysis of the display of sovereign and biopolitical power over the lives (and deaths) of detainees (Foucault), as well as the ways these individuals are reduced to "bare life" under the political pretext of an emergency or "state of exception" (Agamben). Our purpose here is both theoretical and practical: to better understand the often hidden agency or impersonal "will" exercised by the immigrant detention system, but also to equip clinicians in these and cognate facilities (e.g., prisons) with the critical tools by which they might better navigate incommensurable paradigms (i.e., care vs. custody) in order to deliver the best care while upholding their ethical duties as a care provider. This is all the more pressing because hospitals are not sanctuaries and given the incursion of federal law enforcement agents, nurses may find themselves conscripted as de facto agents of the state.

The Real Crisis at the Mexico-U.S. Border: A Humanitarian and Not an Immigration Emergency.

Misguided U.S. Policies since 1980 have created a large undocumented population within the United States. Border militarization curtailed circular undocumented migration from Mexico and Cold War politics precluded the acceptance of refugees from Central America fleeing violence and economic turmoil unleashed by America's intervention in the region. Although undocumented migration from Mexico has ended, resources devoted to border apprehensions and internal deportations continue to rise, pushing an ever larger number of Central Americans into an immigrant detention system that is ill-equipped to handle them. Although the Trump Administration portrays the situation as an immigration crisis, what is really unfolding along the border and within the United States is an unprecedented humanitarian cross that in so many ways is one of our own making.

Increasing Chlamydia and Gonorrhea Infections among Female Juveniles: The Need for Collaboration to Improve Treatment.

Background: Youth in juvenile detention centers are at a high risk for sexually transmitted disease (STD). The current study assesses the trends of chlamydia and gonorrhea (GC) infections and treatment among females within a single county’s juvenile correctional facilities.Methods: This is a retrospective review of aggregate data of female adolescents between 12 and 18 years old who underwent STD screening from 2009 to 2016 in San Bernardino County.Results: Chlamydia infections among adolescent females increased from 11.8% in 2009 to 17.0% in 2016 (p = 0.0002), and GC infections increased from 1.3% in 2009 to 6.0% in 2016 (p < 0.0001). Treatment rates of chlamydia were stable, ranging from 66.7% to 70.8% of positive female adolescents were treated between 2009 and 2016 (p=0.1752). The treatment rate for GC increased from 33% in 2009 to 78.3% in 2016, but annual trends were not statistically significant (p=0.8419).Conclusions: Chlamydia and GC infections among female adolescents discovered during routine screening upon booking into a county juvenile detention system increased over the study time period. Effective collaboration between public health and various community organizations is needed to improve awareness and prevention of STDs amongst at-risk adolescents.

Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System, by Carl Lindskoog

Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System, by Carl Lindskoog

Formulation Policy of Weekend Detention In Indonesia Criminal Law Reform

The purpose of this study is to explain and describe how the formulation policy of weekend detention in Indonesia's positive law and how the formulation policy of weekend detention in the Indonesian criminal law reform in the future (ius constituendum). This research uses normative juridical method of research which is legal research conducted by examining the library material in the form of secondary data such as law or library material as well as other documents that support and data retrieval technique used is library research techniques and analysis of data used is interactive analysis model. The results showed that (1) criminal formulation policy the weekend detention in Indonesia's positive law of the arrangement in the correctional Institution is not regulated about the policy of weekend detention. However, in Indonesian positive law formulation has an assimilation program which is one of the programs in the actual criminal implementation almost resembles a weekend detention system. (2) The policy formulation of the weekend detention in the renewal of Indonesian criminal law (penal policy) can be done by the study of the law comparative countries such as France, Portugal, Vanuatu, Queensland and New South Wales that have implemented a relatively advanced prison system that is the weekend detention. The formulation of weekend detention that is expected to be valid in Indonesia in the future is to develop it firmly in the draft Penal code and paste it in article 65 the Draft Penal code or if the government is about to arrange codification in the law of criminal implementation, the weekend detention is entered in one of the types of criminal sanctions.

Ending Forced Labor In ICE Detention Centers: A New Approach

Privately managed detention centers hold the majority of immigrant detainees in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. Coerced detainee labor in these for-profit facilities is commonplace. The practice contributes significantly to the financial viability of CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two corporations that manage ICE detention centers, but it violates the prohibition on forced labor contained in the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act. This Article provides the first scholarly assessment of a wave of pending class action lawsuits challenging forced labor in privately managed ICE facilities under the TVPA. It concludes that given the breadth of the TVPA and facts revealed in discovery, these lawsuits are likely to succeed and may cause fundamental changes to the current system of mass immigration detention.

COVID-19 and immigration detention in the USA: time to act

COVID-19 and immigration detention in the USA: time to act

Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System

Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System

Modelling of Compartmentalized Household Storm water Detention System using SWMM5

Modelling of Compartmentalized Household Storm water Detention System using SWMM5

Listening beyond the border: Self-representation, witnessing, and the white sonic field

This paper considers the relationship between sound and the structural violence of whiteness in the context of the Australian settler colony. It thinks with an archive of audio recordings made by the Manus Recording Project Collective, a group of men currently or formerly held in involuntary and indefinite detention after seeking asylum in Australia, and their collaborators in Melbourne. Tracking the demonisation of refugees in the media and party politics over the past two decades, I develop the notion of the white sonic field as a way of accounting for the way both sound and perception are racially saturated in the settler colony. The sonic field, which comprises both the sounds we hear and the forces that mediate our hearing, is crucial to the maintenance of whiteness in the settler state, structuring perception and naturalising settlement through the repetition of possessive speech acts and the selective silencing of non-white voices. Cutting through the white sonic field are recordings from the where are you today archive produced by the Manus Recording Project Collective. I argue that these recordings reclaim the right to representation, moving beyond both the erasure of refugees and spectacle of their suffering. These recordings compel us to listen beyond the border and beyond the white sonic field, asking us to consider how we might dismantle the carceral system of mandatory and indefinite detention.

Securitisation of female asylum seekers and healthcare in detention centres in Texas

The securitisation of female asylum seekers by the US Government violates the health rights of women during their stay in family detention centres. The study's methodology relies on semi-structured interviews with directors of shelters for asylum seekers, an immigration judge, migrant rights advocates, a border patrol agent, and immigration attorneys who have represented female asylum seekers with diverse medical conditions at detention centres in Dilley and Karnes, Texas 1. The article begins with an explanation about why Central American women are fleeing to the USA. Informed by securitisation theory, the criminalisation of asylum seekers during the Trump administration between 2017 and early 2019 is analysed. The article acknowledges the diverse vulnerabilities that female detainees face in a patriarchal detention system, such as lack of care for pregnant women and sexual abuse. To conclude, alternatives to detention as a way to protect women's health rights and well-being are proposed.

The Urn and the Swastika: Recording Death in the Nazi Camp System*

Abstract Why did Nazi concentration camps routinely send death notifications and even cremation urns to families of dead prisoners, including Jewish prisoners, until well into the war years? This article challenges the assumption that these practices served solely to provide reassurance that the prisoners had died under ‘normal’ circumstances. In the case of Jewish prisoners, urns sent home for burial to families in the Reich were part and parcel of a system of intimidation waged through local Gestapo offices. These urns also illuminate changing practices around prisoner deaths within camps themselves and the dissonant character of Nazi camp organization. On the one hand, camp administrators adhered to long-standing German state practices, establishing civil registries on camp premises to record prisoner deaths. On the other hand, they flouted bureaucratic norms, fabricating the causes of prisoner death on a grand scale and using bureaucratic procedures to veil the gross mistreatment of inmates. In many camps, prisoner labour was forced to help manufacture and uphold this imperfect subterfuge. These histories point to one of the few places in which the death of Jewish prisoners in the Nazi detention system was systematically recorded and conveyed back to families and Jewish communities in the Reich. Yet, paradoxically, the ‘processing’ of death in the major concentration camps was in many respects untrustworthy, and intimidation now also hovered over what had been a credible, neutral civil procedure.