Detention Stories and the Criminology of Vindictiveness

• In Event: Enforcing the Border: Criminalization, Fear and Detention in the Age of Punishment

Abstract

Based on interviews with twenty subjects presently or formerly held in immigration detention facilities in the North-East United States, I locate the practices and rationales of these conditions of confinement within criminology of vindictiveness. I argue that such conditions are reflective of designed and legitimated structures of bureaucratic violence and race/class imaginaries constituted by: (i) traditional rituals of correctional humiliation, and (ii) new authoritarian controls of the body, soul and mind. These dehumanizing and colonizing properties of the Deportation Nation can best be understood by the culture of vindictiveness that emerges within a society of cruelty and exclusion now three decades into the neo-liberal era.

Author

• David Brotherton, The Graduate Center, CUNY