The U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay has long been synonymous with torture, secrecy, and the abuse of executive power. It has come to epitomize lawlessness and has sparked protracted legal ...battles and political debate. For too long, however, Guantanamo has been viewed in isolation and has overshadowed a larger, interconnected global detention system that includes other military prisons such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, secret CIA jails, and the transfer of prisoners to other countries for torture. Guantanamo is simply - and alarmingly - the most visible example of a much larger prison system designed to operate outside the law.Habeas Corpus after 9/11 examines the rise of the U.S.-run global detention system that emerged after 9/11 and the efforts to challenge it through habeas corpus (a petition to appear in court to claim unlawful imprisonment). Habeas expert and litigator Jonathan Hafetz gives us an insider's view of the detention of enemy combatants and an accessible explanation of the complex forces that keep these systems running. In the age of terrorism, some argue that habeas corpus is impractical and unwise. Hafetz advocates that it remains the single most important check against arbitrary and unlawful detention, torture, and the abuse of executive power.
Michael Lobban examines the use of detention without trial in the British African Empire, evaluating the various legal powers used to facilitate imperial expansion. An essential text for lawyers and ...historians, Imperial Incarceration demonstrates the importance of context in understanding the law's effect.
Detention and confinement—of both combatants and large groups of civilians—have become fixtures of asymmetric wars over the course of the last century. Counterinsurgency theoreticians and ...practitioners explain this dizzying rise of detention camps, internment centers, and enclavisation by arguing that such actions "protect" populations. In this book, Laleh Khalili counters these arguments, telling the story of how this proliferation of concentration camps, strategic hamlets, "security walls," and offshore prisons has come to be. Time in the Shadows investigates the two major liberal counterinsurgencies of our day: Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. War on Terror. In rich detail, the book investigates Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, CIA black sites, the Khiam Prison, and Gaza, among others, and links them to a history of colonial counterinsurgencies from the Boer War and the U.S. Indian wars, to Vietnam, the British small wars in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, and the French pacification of Indochina and Algeria.Khalili deftly demonstrates that whatever the form of incarceration—visible or invisible, offshore or inland, containing combatants or civilians—liberal states have consistently acted illiberally in their counterinsurgency confinements. As our tactics of war have shifted beyond slaughter to elaborate systems of detention, liberal states have warmed to the pursuit of asymmetric wars. Ultimately, Khalili confirms that as tactics of counterinsurgency have been rendered more "humane," they have also increasingly encouraged policymakers to willingly choose to wage wars.
Using a conceptual framework, this 2007 book examines the processes of legal reform in post-socialist countries such as China. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of the 'field', the increasingly complex ...and contested processes of legal reform are analysed in relation to police powers. The impact of China's post-1978 legal reforms on police powers is examined through a detailed analysis of three administrative detention powers: detention for education of prostitutes; coercive drug rehabilitation; and re-education through labour. The debate surrounding the abolition in 1996 of detention for investigation (also known as shelter and investigation) is also considered. Despite over 20 years of legal reform, police powers remain poorly defined by law and subject to minimal legal constraint. They continue to be seriously and systematically abused. However, there has been both systematic and occasionally dramatic reform of these powers. This book considers the processes which have made these legal changes possible.
Given the complexity of habeas corpus law, one can understand why "fairminded jurists" have disagreed over the circumstances under which a person in government custody may challenge his sentence or ...conviction. But amid these debates, Americans have taken a bedrock principle of the criminal legal system for granted: that it is unconscionable for innocent people to be incarcerated for crimes they have not committed. Six Supreme Court Justices have just made it more difficult to effectuate this truism. Last Term, in 'Jones v. Hendrix', the Court curtailed incarcerated people's ability to seek habeas corpus review of their convictions. 'Jones' held that a federal prisoner who filed a motion to have his sentence vacated, set aside, or corrected, and who could not file a subsequent motion because his new claim did not fall within one of the two exceptions to the statutory bar on second or successive motions, does not qualify for federal habeas review6 even if he is not guilty of the crime for which he is imprisoned. And the last thirty years demonstrate that neither Congress nor the judiciary is willing to vindicate the rights of wrongfully incarcerated innocent people.
To many, asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatric hospitals, and many mental health ...facilities closed down. Yet, as Anne Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the modern prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance. Parsons shows how the lack of community-based services, a fear-based politics around mental illness, and the economics of institutions meant that closing mental hospitals fed a cycle of incarceration that became an epidemic.This groundbreaking book recasts the political narrative of the late twentieth century, as Parsons charts how the politics of mass incarceration shaped the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals and mental health policy making. In doing so, she offers critical insight into how the prison took the place of the asylum in crucial ways, shaping the rise of the prison industrial complex.
Discussions about U.S. migration policing have traditionally focused on enforcement along the highly charged U.S.-Mexico boundary. Enforcement practices such as detention policies designed to ...restrict access to asylum also transpire in the Caribbean. Boats, Borders, and Bases tells a missing, racialized history of the U.S. migration detention system that was developed and expanded to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants. Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz argue that the U.S. response to Cold War Caribbean migrations established the legal and institutional basis for contemporary migration detention and border-deterrent practices in the United States. This book will make a significant contribution to a fuller understanding of the history and geography of the United States’s migration detention system.
The year 2021 witnessed the publication of the latest volume of Refugee Tales, which chronologically coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention by the UK ...and other countries. This collection is the fourth volume of the Refugee Tales Project, which began in 2015 with a yearly meeting to walk and share stories by victims of detention, with the main goal of abolishing indefinite detention in the UK. The Refugee Tales Project, which exposes the humanitarian crisis involved in displacement, refugeehood, and detention, is primarily a spatial project that is concerned with borders and boundary crossings. The centrality of space can be seen reflected in the stories collected in Refugee Tales IV, which also reveal a sustained interest in the dimension of time. In this context, the present study addresses borders and border-crossing in the literary voicing of migrants’ experience as these migrants interact with spatial and temporal planes, with the aim of exploring such an interaction in a selection of narratives from Refugee Tales IV. This analysis examines the selected tales from the perspectives of the treatment of space, time, and the disoriented perception of both, considering how the articulation of these parameters contributes to the exposure of the injustices in detention and refugeehood.