American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons.

• Date: 01 January 2005
• Author: Wilensky, Julie
• Published date: 01 January 2005
• Author: Wilensky, Julie

American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons, by Mark Dow Publisher: University of California Press (2004) Price: $27.50

In the wake of stringent 1996 federal immigration laws and post-9/11 terrorism concerns, the number of immigrants held in administrative detention in the U.S. has Increased at an alarming rate. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) currently detains around 200,000 noncitizens each year, and the federal government plans to expand the number of detention beds by 40,000 in the next five years. (1) Some detainees are held in agency centers, but most are held in public and private corrections facilities alongside criminals serving sentences. (2) Mark Dow documents this lucrative and expanding system of immigration detention in American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with detainees, advocates, immigration officials, government bureaucrats, and prison personnel, Dow provides a compelling account of the arbitrariness, secrecy, and abuse that pervades the U.S. immigration detention system.

American Gulag's greatest strength is Dow's vivid presentation of individual stories using detainees' own words in lengthy quotations from interviews and letters. Through these accounts, Dow demonstrates how detention transforms ordinary people into dissidents and activists who carry out widespread hunger strikes and media campaigns to protest their detention and mistreatment. He draws readers into the story of Tony Ebibillo, a Nigerian asylum seeker who was detained for a year and then deported in 1991 for overstaying his visa. During his detention, Ebibillo was often kept in solitary confinement, denied access to a phone, and verbally...