The crisis of borders and prisons can be seen starkly in statistics. In 2011 some 1,500 migrants died trying to enter Europe, and the United States deported nearly 400,000 and imprisoned some 2.3 million people—more than at any other time in history. International borders are increasingly militarized places embedded within domestic policing and imprisonment and entwined with expanding prison-industrial complexes. Beyond Walls and Cages offers scholarly and activist perspectives on these issues and explores how the international community can move toward a more humane future.Working at a range of geographic scales and locations, contributors examine concrete and ideological connections among prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification, and militarization. They challenge the idea that prisons and borders create safety, security, and order, showing that they can be forms of coercive mobility that separate loved ones, disempower communities, and increase shared harms of poverty. Walls and cages can also fortify wealth and power inequalities, racism, and gender and sexual oppression.As governments increasingly rely on criminalization and violent measures of exclusion and containment, strategies for achieving change are essential. Beyond Walls and Cages develops abolitionist, no borders, and decolonial analyses and methods for social change, showing how seemingly disconnected forms of state violence are interconnected. Creating a more just and free world—whether in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, the Morocco-Spain region, South Africa, Montana, or Philadelphia—requires that people who are most affected become central to building alternatives to global crosscurrents of criminalization and militarization.
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Reviews for Beyond Walls and Cages
Dylan Rodríguez
author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime
Bringing together immigrant justice and antiprison organizing, this volume offers an unusual and enlightening mix of writing by scholars, activists, and artists. There is not a lot available on migrant detention, and from what this book tells us it is on the increase, with record numbers of people detained.
Jennifer Hyndman
author of Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism
This is an unashamedly partisan book, which nails its colours firmly to the anti-prison and immigrant justice masts – and the success of the collection is all the greater for it. A timely, insightful and diverse collection, it spans an enormous range of issues and perspectives and offers a rich discussion of the connections between prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification and militarisation.
Dominique Moran
Society and Space
This is a radical book that strips away any pretense that prisons and policies designed to place as many people as possible in them can be humane. The writers herein issue a clear and thoughtful call to reconsider the entire concept of prisons that US society and its institutions have based their approach to dealing with the poor, non-white, and others with little power in their midst.
Ron Jacobs
Counterpunch
Beyond Walls and Borders is a resounding ‘must-read’ for any activist, scholar, or those straddling worlds between.
Ulises Moreno-Tabarez
London School of Economics and Political Science Review of Books
The diversity of voices and perspectives in one of the strengths of [Beyond Walls and Cages], taken collectively the reader is given a complex and multifaceted picture of imprisonment and detention. . . . [it is an] important contribution to the existing critical geographic scholarship on imprisonment and immigrant detention.
Jill Williams
Antipode