“I Would Wish Death on You…”
Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime

The last dozen years have yielded an almost astronomical growth in the operating capacity, jurisdictional expansion, and institutional geography of U.S. immigration prisons, and recent years have brought increased attention to the U.S. government’s carceral investments in both secret/CIA proctored detention sites and U.S. military prisons in places like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. By extension, the modalities in which racially pathologized brown bodies encounter the racist state through border militarization, ¹ “anti-terrorism,” and “anti-gang” policing (etc.) significantly articulate through the institutional spaces and surveillance/punishment technologies of the U.S. global carceral formation. While these institutional formations can and must be contextualized within the historical specificities of the current moment of global U.S. statecraft and its symbiotic projects of (extra-domestic) nation-building and white supremacist institutionality, my specific concerns here run across a pair of overlapping conceptual and analytical questions: 1) What does the regime—the strategic organization and deployment of carceral-punitive technologies—encompassing immigrant detention prisons, secret prisons, and U.S. military prisons tell us of the genealogy and institutional movements of the U.S. prison generally? 2) If these “new” prisons are neither anomalies nor qualitatively novel state fabrications, how are they connected organically to a genealogy of U.S. state violence and terror across different geographies, from the domestic and local, to the “exotic” and global?

It is worth briefly placing the data regarding the last two decades of immigrant imprisonment (and the rapidly accelerating growth therein) within the context of the U.S. prison industrial complex writ large. In so doing, the critical praxis of addressing immigrant detention might more adequately resist the impulse to analytically amputate this particular modality and geography of imprisonment from the overarching and socially constitutive historical technologies of racist and white supremacist U.S. state violence, policing, and imprisonment.

According to the U.S. government’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics, “between 1985 and 2000 the number of immigration offenders under sentence in a Federal prison increased from 1,593 to 13,676.” ² On the other hand, the number of people imprisoned in the U.S. grew from 800,000 in 1985 ³ to over 2.2 million in 2005. ⁴ I offer these figures to illustrate what may seem an obvious point, but one which bears repeating in the wake of repeated (and technically accurate) claims that immigrant detention prisons are the most rapidly increasing facet of the U.S. carceral formation: while the almost tenfold increase in the number of immigrants held in Federal detention centers is a remarkable one, this carceral body count constitutes a minute portion of the policing-imprisonment-punishment nexus, and to suggest that it ought to be treated as politically distinct from the living apocalypse of the larger U.S. prison industrial complex is to work within a structure of willful ignorance at best, and political bad faith at worst.

The U.S. prison, as a regime of dominance and strategic violence, institutes technologies of power that exceed the prison’s formal designation as a place governed by the constraints of the criminal-juridical. Thus, we might consider imprisonment as a practice of social ordering and geopolitical power, and not as a self-evident or foreclosed jurisprudential practice: in this context, the “post-9/11” formation of the Homeland Security State, the 2004 spectacle of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, and accelerated immigrant criminalization/detention can be understood as particular significations of a regime of dominance that is neither (only) local nor (erratically) exceptional, but is at once mobilized, proliferating, and global.

I have argued elsewhere ⁵ for a conception of the U.S. prison not as a self-contained institution or isolated place, but rather as a material prototype of organized punishment and (social, civil, and biological) death. Thus, to understand the U.S. prison as a regime is to focus conceptually, theoretically, and politically on the prison as a pliable module or mobilized vessel through which American globality generates its particular (local) practices of legitimated violence and bodily immobilization. To invoke and critically revise Negri and Hardt’s formulation in the widely read text Empire, ⁶ the focal question becomes: How does the right of the U.S.-as-global police to kill, detain, obliterate become voiced, juridically coded, and culturally recoded?

The structure of presumption—and therefore relative political silence—enmeshing the prison’s centrality to the logic of American globality is precisely evidence of the fundamental power of the U.S. prison regime within the larger schema of American hegemony. In this sense, the U.S. prison regime is ultimately really not an “institution,” in the contained sense of a discrete and juridically delimited domain; rather, it is a formulation of world order (hence, a dynamic and perpetual labor of institutionalization rather than a definitive modernist institution) in which massively scaled, endlessly strategized technologies of human immobilization address (while never fully resolving) the socio-political crises of globalization. The U.S. prison regime defines a global logic of social organization that constitutes, mobilizes, and prototypes across various localities. What would it mean, then, to consider state-crafted, white supremacist modalities of imprisonment as the perpetual end rather than the self-contained means of American globality?

It is precisely because the U.S. prison regime composes an acute formation of racist and white supremacist state violence that its very institutionality encompasses the capacity for mobilization of an epochal (and internally dynamic) white supremacist global logic. It is within this composition of the “global”—as it is indelibly marked by the genealogies of “local” U.S. racial formation and racist statecraft—that the particular institutional extremities of the prison regime (e.g. accelerated immigrant criminalization and detention, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay military prisons, CIA secret prisons) can be more delicately resituated and critically addressed.

An elaboration on the genealogy of the U.S. prison regime, from its post-emancipation institutional origins to its contemporary globality, is necessary here. I initiate the final section of this essay with two points of departure, in the hope of fostering a conceptualization of the U.S. prison regime that speaks to the productive entanglement of two structural logics: 1) white supremacy as a historical modality of social (dis)organization; and 2) the capacity of allegedly “local” or “domestic” U.S. social formations to circulate, militarize, and mobilize across global geographies.

1. See generally Volume 28, Number 2 (2002) of Social Justice: a Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order, a special issue entitled “Gatekeeper’s State: Immigration and Boundary Policing in an Era of Globalization.”[↑]
2. John Scalia and Marika F. X. Litras, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Immigration Offenders in the Federal Criminal Justice System, 2000”, Special Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, August 2002, NCJ 191745, 5.[↑]
3. Tracy Snell, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Correctional Populations in the United States, 1992.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, January 1995, NCJ-146413.[↑]
4. Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prisoners in 2005.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, November 2006, NCJ 215092.[↑]
5. Dylan Rodríguez, “(Non)Scenes of Captivity: The Common Sense of Punishment and Death,” Radical History Review, Issue 96 (2006), 9-32.[↑]
6. Negri and Hardt’s conceptualize Empire as the “right of the police” as such: In order to take control of and dominate such a completely fluid situation, it is necessary to grant the intervening authority (1) the capacity to define, every time in an exceptional way, the demands of intervention; and (2) the capacity to set in motion the forces and instruments that in various ways can be applied to the diversity and the plurality of the arrangements in crisis. Here, therefore, is born, in the name of the exceptionality of the intervention, a form of right that is really a right of the police. The formation of a new right is inscribed in the deployment of prevention, repression, and rhetorical force aimed at the reconstruction of social equilibrium: all this is proper to the activity of the police. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, 16-17.[↑]