[We are very grateful to Smita Ghosh, JD, Class of 2014, and PhD Candidate, American Legal History, at the University of Pennsylvania, for this report!]
Last week I went up to Columbia University’s Heyman
Center for an interdisciplinary
conference on incarceration in America.
I thought the focus on “confinement” would gel with my interest in
immigration detention (and if confinement’s not your bag, the conference
focused on “mobility” as well). I I’m certainly glad I went. The
gathering was organized by
Hidetaka
Hirota,
who presented his work on immigration
enforcement in the early 1900s at the Annual Meeting of ASLH last
year. I wanted to share some impressions on the conference to those LHB
readers who are interested in the topic but for whatever reason
couldn’t be confined there.
The
first panel on Imprisonment and Poverty, chaired by Samuel Roberts (who presented
his work on heroin treatment in New York at Penn last week).
Julily Kohler-Hausmann oriented historians of the ‘70s to the growth of
the criminal justice provisions within the welfare state, tracking the
growth of fraud penalties in state-level welfare laws. Reuben J. Miller
presented a study of the barriers that impede
former prisoners as they “re-enter” society, and argued that reentry
programs require conformity to the role of willing and repentant
participant in order to access services. Kristin Turney’s presentation
suggested that parents and children experience extreme
emotional and financial strain after mothers are incarcerated, and that
this impact is especially high among children whose parents lived
together before the mother’s incarceration.
The
second panel on arresting and detaining migrants had two
speakers--unfortunately Kelly Lytle Hernandez, who is working on a study
of settler colonialism and incarceration in LA, was unable to make it.
Emily Ryo presented a study of legal attitudes among immigrant
detainees (drawn from the Immigrant
Detention Study
she is doing with Caitlin
Patler). She revealed that migrant detainees find legal rules to be
arbitrary, punitive and inscrutable by design. Juliet Stumpf used
family detention to show how developments in other forms of law can
migrate to immigration law. One example: advocates
have tried to use state childcare licensing laws to improve--or
end--family detention in Texas.
In
the third panel, “The War on Drugs, The War on Terror,” two
historians--Donna Murch and Elizabeth Hinton--presented research on the
mobilization and expansion of local law enforcement via federal
subsidies in the 1960s and ’70s. Their work, which drew from
Murch’s forthcoming study of Los Angeles and Hinton’s new
book,
would be of interest to those who
attended “Crime, Punishment, and Federalism: The Curious Case of the
Law Enforcement Assistance Administration” at the ALSH annual meeting
last year, which featured commentary from Hinton as well). Finally, the
conference ended with Michel Welch’s assessment
of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo
Journal. The document, he argues, presents
a glimpse of American culture at its most perverse.
