Ennely Medina’s new article on The [F]law examines how legislatively imposed bed mandates in immigration detention facilities increase the rates of immigration detention throughout the United States. While those in favor of the mandate rely on narratives about illegal immigration and counterterrorism to legitimize their actions, the simultaneous implementation of bed mandates and the expansion of the private prison industry is hard to ignore. This piece aims to reveal the direct and indirect ways in which the private prison industry shaped the immigration regulatory landscape to best fit its goal of profit maximization, legitimizing racial and xenophobic hierarchies at the cost of immigrants’ lives suffering in detention.
Read the article here.
Related SJP Resources
From The [F]law:
- Emma Leibowitz, First Make A Profit: Health Care and the True Price of For-Profit Immigration Detention
- Adriel Williams, The Costs of Carceral Communications: How a Prison Telecommunications Company Exploits Incarcerated People and Their Loved Ones
- Connie Cheng, From Walls to Shackles: The Big Business of Electronically Monitoring Immigrants