Book Review: Caging borders and carceral states: Incarcerations, immigration detentions, and resistance

• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567720945013
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Part II focuses on the geopolitics of detention centers within the United States, a transition away

from the centrality of military base infrastructure characteristic of the 1940s, and how decisions to

establish them in remote locations limited legal representation and suppo rt for specific groups.

Furthermore, they focus on how long-term detention in the early 1980s, “fueled the pressure for

space and led to further construction, reliance on subcontracting agreements, and the routine use of

transfers within the network of facilities (p. 88),” problems that persist into the current moment.

Specific to this section is also an explicit discussion of “the stigma of ‘criminalization’” associated

with the use of bureau of prison facilities to confine migrants and the distinctions made between

“administrative” detentions versus punitive detention.

Part III hones in on the regional deterrence strategy in the Caribbean to illustrate the extraterri-

torial and third country “safe haven” expansion of the U.S. migrant detention system. Simultane-

ously, this section begins to trac e “how these operations fueled the sta te’s performance of the

spectacular United States Mexico border, which in turn obscured en forcement in other regions

(p. 149),” in what the authors call a regional racial politics (p. 166). This section ends by tracing

the system of transfers, subcontracting practices, and privatization of the internal U.S. detention

system.

The authors also attempt to highlight how the Caribbean chapter remains separate from prevailing

explanations of U.S. detention and deterrence policies, furt her contributing to recent work that

explicitly focuses on the racialized connections between migration control and mass incarceration.

Although they dive into the political nature of “forgetting” and exclusion from national discourse in

chapter 5, it is somewhat unclear how this persists into the present day.

The authors provide a thorough overview of both U.S. migration control and humanitarian aid/

rescue policies suitable for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. This overview addi-

tionally allows the reader to draw their own connections across various policies. Although this book

makes a much-needed contribution to critical geography, migration, race, criminology, and legal

scholarship, it also nicely complements recent work-like From Deportation to Prison: The Politics

of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America, which seek to identify the rise of migrant

detention throughout the US. This book takes that task one step further by theorizing spaces and

processes of deterrence and detention beyond the interior of the US while making an even broader

contribution to research on multijurisdictional patchworks.

Chase, R. T. (Ed.). (2019).

Caging borders and carceral states: Incarcerations, immigration detentions, and resistance. UNC Press Books.

440 pp. $29.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-4696-5124-8.

Reviewed by: Manuel A. Ramirez , University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567720945013

How did a range of federal, state, local, and privatized institutions evolve in the 20th century to

create the system of incarceration, removal, and displacement we see today against racialized

groups? Caging Borders and Carceral States edited by Robert T. Chase addresses this question

by exploring the history of the racialized oppression produced by carceral regimes across the United

States’ Sunbelt, which includes the states of Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mis-

sissippi, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas, most of Californ ia, and parts of North Carolina,

Nevada, and Utah. Focusing on the 20th century, this volume examines significant events that have

468 International Criminal Justice Review 30(4)