“A marked decrease in detentions”: Lessons from the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s decarceration experiment, 1933

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Bureaucratic Politics (Table 15)

Abstract

All forms of confinement are dehumanizing, and immigration detention is particularly notorious for its human rights and due process violations — making the decarceration of these facilities an urgent social justice concern. Yet while much is known about the expansion of detention in the United States since the 1980s, relatively little is known about the development of systems of release from detention. Addressing this gap, this paper studies a little-known 1933 policy that cut the immigration detention population in half and reduced future detentions. Using a mixed-methods approach, I analyze documents from immigration authorities, state governments, social scientists, Progressive reformers, and immigrants and their advocates; and an original quantitative dataset that maps detention and release before and after the new policy. Preliminary findings suggest that the combination of growing (though limited) critiques of immigration incarceration and Great Depression-era fiscal austerity provided an opening for liberal bureaucrats to reduce detentions. Bureaucrats intervened through administrative, not legislative, means, styling their interventions as technocratic. The policy dramatically reduced both detention and racial disparities in exposure to detention, transforming it from a form of state control ubiquitous in nonwhite noncitizen – and particularly Mexican – communities, to one that was rarer and more distributed across the US. Moreover, immigration districts where detention was concentrated tended to release people with few to no conditions. Despite these successes, the policy’s decarceral impacts were limited because it could be paired with the fast-tracking of deportations for people without a fixed address or with criminal convictions. This analysis of 1933 decarceration will contribute to sociological understandings of both penal change and state power, and offer historical lessons that can support today’s movements working to end immigration detention.

Author

• Audrey Augenbraum, University of California-Berkeley