The Prison Abolitionist Movement: The Convergence of Movements to End Immigrant Detention and Mass Incarceration | DEMOS21

The Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris and Professor Miranda Spieler invite you to the seventh symposium of a 7-part series on "Race, Law and Justice."

The Prison Abolitionist Movement: The Convergence of Movements to End Immigrant Detention and Mass Incarceration (Michelle Kuo)

This paper begins with the observation that the prison abolitionist movement stands at the intersection of two social justice struggles: the demand to end mass incarceration and the call to end immigrant detention and deportation. The former, which alternately describes incarceration as “the new Jim Crow” or “carceral slavery,” centers incarcerated Black people as the inheritors of America’s long history of racial violence. The latter, embodied by #Abolish ICE, has increasingly called detention centers “immigration prisons” and figures the unauthorized immigrant as a longstanding victim of exclusionary policies underpinned by claims of American sovereignty. This convergence has not been inevitable. The legal doctrines under which prisoners and detained migrants are incarcerated—criminal law and administrative law, respectively—have been mostly discrete. This paper describes the legal conditions in the past thirty years, in particular the implications of the crimmigration field, that have made this convergence possible. It asks how this convergence might be fruitful in imagining new forms of collectivity among immigrants and descendants of American slaves.

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