3575 - Legal Apartheid? A Dialogue about Life under Mass Incarceration and Mass Deportation

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

This panel explores the parallels and contrasts between mass incarceration and mass deportation. While subjects of both criminal justice and immigration control face panoptic surveillance, social isolation, and a constant threat of apprehension, scholarship on the two systems remains siloed. Discussing them together makes it possible to consider to what extent US social control hinges around legal status, race, and disenfranchisement, in what combination. Is criminal justice an inheritance of Jim Crow, and thus distinct from immigrant exclusion? Or is there a new “legal apartheid” in the US, blocking both low-income Latinos and African-Americans from social and economic mobility? The implications shape whether the disenfranchised should demand (racially-based) civil rights or push for a distinct, “legal justice.” Here, we bring scholars together across the immigration/incarceration divide to discuss the similarities and differences in the two groups’ experiences of policing and the utility of the legal versus the racial lens. Participants will discuss a series of questions, such as 1) how are mass deportation and mass incarceration lived in the day-to-day? 2) how does racism and racial ideology play into their experiences? 3) what are the economic, emotional and political implications for members’ involvement in US society, 4) how do both systems use gendered terms as a form of legitimation, targeting men while producing “collateral consequences” for women and families? 5) what kinds of frames hold promise for resistance, racial justice, legal inclusion, and Black-Brown collaboration?

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Session Organizer

• Abigail L. Andrews, University of California-San Diego

Individual Presentations

• The Economic, Social, and Health Consequences of Long-term Detention on Detainees, Households, and Communities - Caitlin Patler, University of California-Davis

• Childhood in an Era of Mass Forced Parental Absence - Christopher Wildeman, Cornell University

• Mass Incarceration and Mass Deportation: Cross-Cutting Practices and Consequences of Surveilling Institutions - Sara Wakefield, Rutgers University

• Understanding Immigrant Detention From Within: Legal Consciousness and the Victimization of the Crimmigration System - Rocio Rosales, University of California-Irvine