AMERICAN GULAG: Inside US Immigration Prisons
By Mark Dow
University of California Press, 2004
413 pages, $55 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/31699
"You African monkeys should go back to your country", was how the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) official greeted the female asylum seeker at the airport. Mark Dow has gathered together the stories of would-be immigrants like this unfortunate woman (name suppressed for her safety) in his revelatory book on the racist heart of US immigration policy and the shocking levels of abuse and mistreatment inside America's immigration prisons.
Although INS detainees are technically not prisoners (they are "administrative detainees"), they wear prison uniform (orange jumpsuits), are locked in prison cells, eat prison food and obey prison rules, whether they are held in INS detention centres, federal penitentiaries, county jails or private prisons. On any day in America, an average of 23,000 immigrants are in jail and are caught up in the prison world of psychological humiliation, physical abuse and sexual harassment.
Humiliation is the bread and butter of the immigration prison. As a former immigration "corrections officer" put it to Dow, "I think it's so much more effective to embarrass and humiliate a prisoner than it is to kick his ass".
Techniques refined from long use with criminal prison inmates are applied to non-criminal immigrants. Arbitrary use of isolation, verbal harassment, waking detainees in the middle of the night on the pretext of security checks, issuing dirty underwear and bedding, non-issuing of pillows, soap, towels. Twenty-three hour lock-down in cells, showers every second day, racial slurs, spitting in detainees' food, denial of medical treatment. Breakfast served at 5am. Overcrowding. Cells six feet by six feet. Eating meals from the floor. Handcuffing and feet-shackling.
A special category of humiliation involves an obsession with toilets — locking detainees in toilet cubicles for 24 hours, placing detainees' heads in toilet bowls, throwing detainees' religious books in the toilet. "All in a night's work", says one ex-jailer.
Beatings, kickings, drenching a prisoner with water and leaving them to freeze, and other physical abuse of immigrants is routine, tolerated by officials and, to cover themselves, blamed on fights on detainees. Deportation of "difficult" cases can be accompanied by forced tranquilisation with thorazine and benadryl. Hunger strikes and other non-violent protests are broken up by armed jailers with riot control gear and batons, the asylum seekers looking on with horror as their US jailers repeat the violence of the "security forces" the detainees have fled.
Sexual exploitation is rife. There is frequent sexually motivated strip-searching of women detainees. Rape is regular — its perpetrators uncharged because (according to the department of "justice") rape charges against jailers lack "prosecutive merit" because of lack of witnesses and physical evidence. There is a flourishing trade in sexual favours from desperate women detainees in return for the false promise of early release.
Economic exploitation is endemic. At one end is the personal enrichment of prison officers at detainees' expense, including theft of immigrants' property and money. At the corporate end, privatisation offers fabulous profit potential. The INS pays private companies, like the Wackenhut Corporation, and local county governments an average US$55 per detainee per day.
Boosting the profit margin are cost-cutting measures on detainee services such as health care — for example prescribing only pediatric doses of medication for adults with Hepatitis A, or extracting teeth rather than filling them because extractions are cheaper. Local counties in the economic doldrums lap up the windfall. In Alabama, Etowah County's 15-year contract with the INS means a revenue stream of$120 million.
The September 11, 2001, attack in the US was also good for business for the "private prison profiteers". The Wackenhut CEO waxed optimistic about federal agencies having "urgent needs to increase current offender capacity" for thousands of new clients of "Middle Eastern descent".
Civil and legal rights of detainees are also infringed by denial of access to lawyers, families, advocates and the media. The denial of rights continues even when immigration judges (who are employees of the INS) rule for a detainee's release only to have their ruling arbitrarily overridden by an INS district director who trumps an INS judge in the bureaucratic hierarchy.
The outcomes of the abuse of immigration detainees are predictable. Some attempt suicide, many suffer from depression and other mental disorders. Often, driven to despair by indefinite detention and abuse, detainees "choose" deportation back to their country of origin, whose violation of human rights has been condemned by even the US State Department. None of these outcomes is the result of poor management. Rather, the "voluntary" deportations and deterrence of others from attempting to enter the "land of the free" are the desired results of immigration policy achieved through making "illegal" immigrants' lives miserable.
The abusive world of the immigration prison rarely comes to light, however, because the INS is secretive about what Dow, following Solzhenitsyn, calls its "gulag archipelago", an invisible country within a country. The outside appearance of many INS detention centres is deliberately bland (resembling a warehouse or an insurance office) so that the public will not know it is a prison. Should people start getting inquisitive, they face difficulty in determining exactly who is held where because the INS frequently moves its prisoners, usually in the dead of night without informing family or lawyers.
Pesky journalists are kept in the dark — the Dallas Morning News, for example, had to sue the INS to get the names and locations of 851 asylum seekers and "criminal aliens" who had been held for three years or more.
Other obstacles placed in the way of communication with detainees include restricted access to telephones, or financial disincentives to their use, as in the Cranston City jail in Rhode Island, for example, where calls cost $1.69 a minute with a $4.60 flagfall. The American Bar Association, the professional association of lawyers, has been coopted into the secrecy agenda by agreeing to not talk to the media in return for access to the prisons.
With detainees out of sight, it is easier to put them out of mind as human beings and to replace their humanity with politically useful stereotypes. Former President Bill Clinton's changes to immigration law in 1996 played up the "illegality" of "illegal immigrants", further blurring the line between asylum seeker and criminal. Clinton expanded the categories of crimes for which legal, permanent resident immigrants could be automatially detained and deported.
Minor, non-violent misdemeanors for which no jail time has been served, such as shoplifting, possession of marijuana and cashing of bad cheques, created small armies of "criminal aliens" who were deported by the thousands (4427 in 1996, and 10,663 in 1999). Many immigrants who had already served jail time were doubly punished, often facing a period of detention longer than their criminal sentence.
September 11 has also been exploited by the current Bush administration to confuse "illegal immigrant" with "terrorist", to further justify the denial of detainees' civil rights. In 2003, the INS was renamed the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (BICE) and moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security where secrecy and denial of civil rights find an even cosier bureaucratic home.
The political climate conditions the prison guards, says Dow, to see the detainees as dangerous criminals, when, in fact, the "typical immigrant experience" involves being picked up usually for the "crime" of overstaying their visa. In a racist immigration system, however, it is "mostly the dark-skinned" visa over-stayers who are detained and abused, not the fair-skinned visa over-stayers.
Racism and criminalisation are the pillars of this abusive system. Nigerians, Haitians, Somalis, Africans, and increasingly Arabs — all are seen as "aliens", criminals and terrorists, the sub-human scapegoats for the economic and social ills of the capitalist US.
The individual stories of abuse in this book illustrate a systematic pattern of mistreatment and racism, corroborated by ex-jailers and ex-nurses who have nothing to gain by coming forward other than hoping to reveal the truth of what goes on in the "hidden country" of US immigration prisons, a secret country that has many parallels to the dark world of the gulag.