Abstract
AbstractIn 1999, amidst a racialised panic over so-called ‘criminal aliens’, the US Federal Bureau of Prisons announced the creation of the first Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons. This system of privately operated facilities was designed specifically to hold immigrant men convicted of federal crimes and facilitate their deportation. Under Bureau of Prisons policy, CAR prisons do not provide the same rehabilitative services offered to US citizen prisoners. Notably, these prisons disproportionately incarcerate Latino men in general, and Mexican men in particular. While there is a wealth of scholarship on privatisation (Dolovich 2009) race (Walker 2016) and citizenship (Eagly and Shafer 2020) in prisons, few scholars (although see Martin 2020; Kaufman 2019) have attempted to make sense of the connections between outsourced incarceration, citizenship, and racial difference. Tracing the crisis of ‘criminal aliens’ in concert with the Clinton administration’s drive to privatise the Federal Government, this chapter argues that outsourced, all-foreign prisons appealed to federal policymakers, who were keen to target non-citizens, but were constrained by an overcrowded prison system and public opposition to increased spending on incarceration. Through analysis of CAR prison contracts, archival government sources, and the testimonies of incarcerated men, the chapter shows how ‘criminal aliens’ have become the default subjects of a racialised regime of public–private incarceration premised on extracting financial value from incarcerated life. Overall, the chapter argues that by tying eligibility for outsourced incarceration to deportability, the CAR prison system works to define and reinforce the boundaries of citizenship and racial difference through deprivation and exclusion.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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