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.
The liberal legal ideal of protection of the individual against administrative detention without trial is embodied in the habeas corpus tradition. However, the use of detention to control immigration ...has gone from a wartime exception to normal practice, thus calling into question modern states' adherence to the rule of law. Daniel Wilsher traces how modern states have come to use long-term detention of immigrants without judicial control. He examines the wider emerging international human rights challenge presented by detention based upon protecting 'national sovereignty' in an age of global migration. He explores the vulnerable political status of immigrants and shows how attempts to close liberal societies can create 'unwanted persons' who are denied fundamental rights. To conclude, he proposes a set of standards to ensure that efforts to control migration, including the use of detention, conform to principles of law and uphold basic rights regardless of immigration status.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence This book examines what happens when states and other authorities use detention to abuse their power, deter dissent and maintain social ...hierarchies. Written by an author with decades of practical experience in the human rights field, the book examines a variety of scenarios where individuals are unlawfully detained in violation of their most basic rights to personal liberty and exposes the many fallacies associated with arbitrary detention. Proposing solutions for future policy to scrutinise processes, this is a call for greater respect for the rule of law and human rights.
This book analyses torture, inhuman and degrading treatment towards migrants worldwide, integrating overviews from several contexts and disciplines. It highlights that today migrants’ mistreatment is ...a global phenomenon, a frequent element of the migratory experience (in countries of departure, of transit, of arrival), an intrinsic component of state policies, and an extreme form of that structural violence which is inherent to the contemporary war on migrants at the global level.
The expansion of immigration detention in the United States has been attributed to policy, privatization, and anti-immigrant racialization. This research extends understandings of immigration ...detention's growth by focusing on how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintains the necessary space to detain migrants during this expansion. In this article, I introduce the concept of “malleable detention:” the flexible strategies and methods used to restructure space within immigration detention. I base this concept on findings from an analysis of the T. Don Hutto Detention Center - a detention site that has remained open despite various abuses, protests, and closures. Using statements from ICE officials, intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs) between ICE and local governments, government reports, nongovernmental reports, and newspaper accounts, I find that the Hutto site displayed three forms of malleable detention. Detention was made malleable through repurposing non-detention space into detention space, maintaining flexibility in the detained populations, and reconfiguring contracts that helped keep detention open. Beyond the Hutto case, the malleable detention concept extends to detention sites throughout the U.S. This provides evidence into how ICE is able to sustain enough detention space that makes the U.S. the largest detainer of immigrants in the world.
In misdemeanor cases, pretrial detention poses a particular problem because it may induce innocent defendants to plead guilty in order to exit jail, potentially creating widespread error in case ...adjudication. While practitioners have long recognized this possibility, empirical evidence on the downstream impacts of pretrial detention on misdemeanor defendants and their cases remains limited. This Article uses detailed data on hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor cases resolved in Harris County, Texas—the third-largest county in the United States—to measure the effects of pretrial detention on case outcomes and future crime. We find that detained defendants are 25% more likely than similarly situated releasees to plead guilty, are 43% more likely to be sentenced to jail, and receive jail sentences that are more than twice as long on average. Furthermore, those detained pretrial are more likely to commit future crimes, which suggests that detention may have a criminogenic effect. These differences persist even after fully controlling for the initial bail amount, offense, demographic information, and criminal history characteristics. Use of more limited sets of controls, as in prior research, overstates the adverse impacts of detention. A quasi-experimental analysis based on case timing confirms that these differences likely reflect the causal effect of detention. These results raise important constitutional questions and suggest that Harris County could save millions of dollars per year, increase public safety, and reduce wrongful convictions with better pretrial release policy.
In 2020-2022, much of the world was at risk for catching COVID-19. This reprint, “Crimmigration in the Age of COVID-19,” contributes to understanding immigration during the pandemic. It engages a ...cross-national and interdisciplinary case-study approach to show how countries carved out exceptions to public health protocols for migrants. In the immigration context a variety of governments weaponized public health protocols to criminalize and exclude migrants. The Trump Administration sadistically misplayed the pandemic at almost every turn. Trump came to power on the backs of migrants, referring to them as murderers and rapists. The intersection of Trump’s COVID-19 and migration policies carved out space for the exceptional dehumanization of migrants in 2020-21. This reprint documents the weaponization of public through crimmigration. Crimmigration is the criminalization of migration and migrants via state-of-the-art surveillance and militarized technologies. During the worst of COVID-19, crimmigration strategies--mandatory detention and harsh exclusions— exacerbated the risk of transmission among migrants. Policies not migrants were to blame here. The ostensibly public health related Title42 actually pushed migrants, already at great risk, into unregulated shantytowns controlled by Mexican drug cartels. Additionally, migrants contended with detention facilities, medium security prisons, that functioned as Petrie dishes for the disease. We hope this reprint contributes to understanding the intersection of public health and crimmigration, and border penologies during these exceptional times.
