Gray Zone

In the desert and in the lush green of Georgia, detention centers look gray and feel gray. And an entire zone of them like in Pinal County, AZ where there are detention centers for ICE, USMS, BoP, AZ, the county, and maybe some agency I'm missing, it's a place that takes away words. Momentarily, and sometimes that can be long enough.


Yesterday I visited the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, which provides legal services to folks in detention in Florence, Eloy, and young people in other facilities. Today Janet Napolitano will be issuing her plans for revamping the immigrant detention system. The side note is that she says that privately run detention centers are more expensive than the state-run system. The fact that we can have a conversation on the public "benefits" of socialized prisons and not health care is telling.

The reform's coming out of the horrors of deaths in custody, family detention, and medical neglect, which show the need for oversight and reform. But Napalitano's solution of this gray zone of "residential" detention has been done before. Without having my library in front of me, I'm pretty certain Mike Davis wrote about this way back in City of Quartz and I'm also pretty certain that Mark Dow writes about some of this in American Gulag, too. Secure residential detention sounds like a gated community with more guards, but that language, like that of "beds" and "dormitories" may well ease the humane reform along, but doesn't change the fact of coercive detention and all of the abuses and neglect that comes along with that. Napolitano is not talking about shrinking detention capacity, and the policing of migration and increasing conflation between criminal and immigrant spell more of the same. And that is what it's looking like, at least sitting at the drive-thru.





Hopefully, the timing of NNIRR's latest report, "Guilty by Immigration Status: A report on U.S. violations of the rightsof immigrant families, workers and communities in 2008." with Napolitano's announcement will generate more critical coverage of the announcement that can broaden the discussion on immigrant detention and policing.