Thinking (and moving) beyond walls and cages: bridging immigrant justice and anti-prison organizing in the United States.

• Author: Loyd, Jenna

We continue to find that the prison is itself a border. This analysis has come from prisoners, who name the distinction between the "free world" and the space behind the walls of the prison. This is an important interpretation that undoes the illusions of the powerful nation-states on the one hand and the seeming disorganization and chaos of capital's travels on the other. There is a very specific political economy of the prison that brings the intersections of gender and race, colonialism and capitalism, into view (Davis and Dent, 2001: 1236-1237).

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UNDERSTANDING THE PRISON AS A BORDER ENABLES US TO TIE THE PRESENT intensification of border fortification and expansion within long and unique histories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The important particularities of these histories, and the people whose lives have been shaped by them, are brought together through these borders as much as they are kept apart. At the 2008 Left Forum conference, for example, two of the current authors participated in a session on the connection between walls and cages and organizing strategies to move beyond them. One of the panel's speakers recounted a story about the difficulties of recognizing the commonalities of apparently different forms of migration policing in Queens, New York. Following September 11, South Asian and Muslim communities were rounded up here and nationwide in the name of national security and "fighting terrorism." Meanwhile, agents of the newly founded Immigration and Customs Enforcement were conducting raids in another Queens neighborhood, this time targeting West Indian people as criminals engaged in the drug trade. These groups were each subject to racial profiling, detention, and deportation, yet they were positioned differently in relation to the state and dominant racial formations. The groups were skeptical of one another, one declaring "We're not terrorists!" and the other "We're not criminals!"

These commonsense responses among neighbors living in one New York borough illustrate how practices of civil death, which have strikingly similar effects, nonetheless isolate groups discursively and politically from one another. Criminalization and exclusionary migration policy are forms of "civil death" that create categories of people who are not afforded the broadest range of rights and responsibilities afforded to the most privileged "citizens." Political organizing on these lines has the effect of legitimizing the racialization and state regulation of the other group, thereby bolstering at least one of what Andrea Smith (2006) calls the three pillars of white supremacy: slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism, and Orientalism/war. That is, such strategies reinforce the ways in which U.S. migration policy builds the domestic penal system and how nationalistic defenses of territorial integrity validate ongoing colonialism through a combination of military means and citizenship.

Walls and cages--the shorthand we use for U.S. migration policy and penal ("criminal justice") policy--facilitate contemporary processes of racialized dispossession and capitalist restructuring ("globalization"). Understanding how these differentiations work is thus consequential for people's lives and organizing possibilities. The dynamics that differentiate and isolate groups simultaneously converge and materialize in division's sturdy tools: the bullet, the chain, the cuff, coils of concertina wire, the wall and the cage.

On any given day, there are nearly 2.3 million people in U.S. jails and prisons, and more than twice as many people--5.1 million--are under direct state surveillance through the parole and probation systems (Glaze and Bonczar, 2009). The racial disparities of the punishment complex are well known. Some 58% of the people in prison are sentenced on nonviolent drug offenses and people of color comprise 75% of these prisoners (Ahrens, 2008; The Sentencing Project, n.d.; Wacquant, 2001). Women are being caged faster than any other group, and migrant detention is proliferating at a remarkable pace (West and Sabol, 2009). Over 30,000 migrants are detained on any given night, and over 1.6 million migrants have been deported since 1996 (this figure does not include those who have taken "voluntary departure").

The markedly increased caging of these particular groups is the predictable result, a decade later, of three infamous pieces of 1996 legislation signed into law under President Clinton: the Personal Responsibility and Work Act, which ended welfare as we knew it; the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which imposed minimum sentencing requirements; and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which broadened the categories of criminal and deportable offenses, and made them enforceable retroactively. This is an important moment in the deepening ties between immigration and penal policy, which build on the longer rise of the carceral state in the second half of the 20th century.

From the Left Forum to the U.S. Social Forum, Critical Resistance 10, and more informal settings across the United States, people are engaging in inter-ethnic and inter-national conversations about the convergence between walls and cages. These conversations link different groups of folks who aim to break the ideological divisions that isolate struggles against prisons (and all forms of state violence) from struggles for immigrant and economic justice. We view our individual and collective work as part of this important dialogue and political project of bridging prison abolition and immigrant justice movements. As activist-geographers, we are co-editing a book entitled Beyond Walls and Cages, which brings together the writings of people directly affected by these systems with those of organizers, artists, advocates, and researchers.

Our goals in this piece are twofold: we wish to trace some of the scales of mobility and immobility through which walls and cages work; and we want to link some of the violent deformations marshaled (and entrenched) through these sites to some of the transformative, abolitionist alternatives we envision. Against the violently deformed meanings of justice, community, and safety that walls and cages produce, we promote abolitionist strategies for moving from prisons' "bedspaces" to the homes where people can freely rest and dream.

Audre Lorde (1984: 37) once wrote that "poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton and architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before." In throwing in our lot with generations of abolitionists, the mix of theory and practice is our poetry, creating bridges toward each other to walk through fear and toward another future. If, as Edward Said (1983: 226) suggests, the circulation of ideas is one "enabling condition of intellectual activity," then part of our work is marking the barriers and exclusions through which people and ideas and love struggle to traverse to create (momentary) places. Showing these connections comes out of being in the mix in our various movements and roles and is a condition for being in this mix (Gilmore in Murphy et al., 2005). Accounting for our locations as abolitionist scholar-activists means that documentation and theorizing blur at the edges so that the present and the possible may approach each other. To make desired changes in the world possible, the circulation of ideas is an essential part. And so this essay reflects a node in the circulation of social struggles, a report on the state of connections as they exist in dispersed conversations and murmurings of liberation that are seeking to be materialized more fully.

Scales of Mobility and Immobility

Detention and imprisonment are inherently multi-scalar projects. As a powerful site of state sovereignty, cages are places in which a variety of territorializations of economic and state power converge. The nation-state (border) and the city hold host to the powerful dialectics of fixity and flow, incapacitation and mobility, such as undocumented presence within a national territory, driving while Black or Brown, or being at "the wrong place at the wrong time" in the neighborhood. Very often, "the crime" being punished amounts to a transgression against the state's socio-spatial claims or the claims of private property. For now, walls and cages are deployed across these scales as the primary resolutions to these contradictions (Gilmore and Gilmore, 2008).

Thus, the cage links a host of places far beyond the prison's walls (e.g., the nation, the city, and the home). Places are linked such that the rural prison reproduces the "urban criminal" and policing the border reproduces the nationalistic categories and practices of citizenship and war-making. In this sense, imprisonment is a multi-scalar process that draws in multiple spaces, where they converge in the cage. Regardless of the scale at which territorial claims are invoked (or revoked), detention and imprisonment always relentlessly settle on a "local" site. The human body bares all penalties. Yet by twist of ideological alchemy, those most harmed by migration and penal policy become the origins of threat to the "good" citizen and nation, as are their own harms, rather than nationalist policy or racism. This displaces responsibility for known harms away from the state, obscuring state violence and reinforcing the legitimacy of the state to forcibly regulate "criminals" and "aliens."

Mobility is part of the human condition and international migration is part of the modern condition. Meanwhile, migration controls have become increasingly elaborate in tandem with the push toward freer international capital and commodity movement. Throughout the global South, neoliberal capitalist restructuring has resulted in the displacement of millions of people from rural livelihoods. This...