Borderlines by Daniel Melo;

Author:Daniel Melo; [Melo;, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789045062
Publisher: National Book Network
Published: 2021-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

The long arm of profit and power

Despite the boon that criminalized migrants create for the prison-industrial complex, it is inevitable that the institution extends its reach beyond migrant bodies and communities. Depressed rural American communities, particularly those impacted by NAFTA, see the prisons as a means of alleviating poverty, unemployment, and general decline.33 Despite their perception as beneficial in these poor areas, prisons serve the interests of capital. As abolitionist and prison scholar Ruth Gilmore puts it—they are “geographical solutions to political economic crisis,” a way for capitalism to reabsorb the idle people, land, and capital.34

Despite the short-term economic lift these human warehouses provide, they carry dangers that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. In order to entice (and essentially sponsor) a prison’s development, communities must inevitably pull resources away from social welfare and public services towards incarcerating the very people in its community who will slip further into poverty and criminalization because of the loss of services.35

And when there are no bodies left nearby, prisons increasingly look beyond their immediate setting to alleviate the mass-warehousing of people elsewhere. States such as California move thousands of prisoners (without any due process) to less crowded private prisons, a simpler solution than facing the profound problem of mass incarceration.36 The fallout from this interstate trafficking of prisoners is the citizen version of family separation—further destruction of the detainee’s family; erosion of communities; limited access to counsel; and an assurance of continued recidivism (aside from the multitude of other abuses that take place in prison every day).37

Not unlike the migrant bodies upon which it built an empire, the industry will keep clawing in all sorts of others, including those citizen bodies left destitute by capitalism. Despite the political dividing lines put up between migrant and citizen, they can easily be shifted for the sake of profit. The two groups possess a common link of suffering and oppression, in this case, very real, shared chains.

Much like the profit motive that increasingly is indifferent to the bodies it warehouses, the arm of sovereign power has begun pushing at the edges of the protections extended to citizens. As defense attorney Isabel Garcia notes about Streamline—the move from civil deportation to criminalization “has normalized [the] disregard of formal procedural requirements in our criminal courts…” Streamline Magistrate Judge Velasco echoes:

What we are willing to do to ourselves in the name of criminal justice is horrible, and Streamline is not an exception. Think about the debtors’ prisons we’re creating for economically stressed American citizens. Is this what we really want to do? The saving grace of Streamline—if there is one—is that we are just doing to others what we already do to ourselves.38

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