A World Without Cages: Bridging Immigration and Prison Justice

This book is the first collection to bring together scholars and activists working to end criminal and immigration detention. Employing an intersectional lens and an impressive variety of case studies, the book makes a compelling case to rethink what justice could mean for refugees, citizens, and everyone in between. The book connects immigration detention and prison justice towards reimagining a newer, better future. The ten chapters probe the intersections of immigration detention with current and potential forms of citizenship, membership, belonging, and punishments. Deprivation of liberty is one of the most serious harms that someone can experience. Immigration control is a nation-building project where racial, gender, class, ableist, and other lines of discrimination filter and police access to permanent residence. Employing a kaleidoscope of interdisciplinary backgrounds, the contributors bring this focus to bear on case studies spanning North America, Europe, and Asia. In conversation with social movements challenging police brutality, the contributors are thinking through the implications of de-funding the police, overhauling the ‘criminal justice’ system, eradicating prisons (penal abolitionism), and ending all forms of containment (carceral abolitionism). Neither the prison nor the detention centre is an inevitable feature of our social lives. This book collectively argues that abolishing detention could pave the way for new visions of justice to emerge. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Table of Contents:
Introduction – decarceral futures: bridging immigration and prison justice towards an abolitionist future 1. Mutual aid as abolitionist praxis 2. States and human immobilization: bridging the conceptual separation of slavery, immigration controls, and mass incarceration 3. Crisis, capital accumulation, and the ‘Crimmigration’ fix in the aftermath of the global slump 4. Held at the gates of Europe: barriers to abolishing immigration detention in Turkey 5. Substituting immigration detention centres with ‘open prisons’ in Indonesia: alternatives to detention as the continuum of unfreedom 6. ICE comes to Tennessee: violence work and abolition in the Appalachian South 7. Migrant justice as reproductive justice: birthright citizenship and the politics of immigration detention for pregnant women in Canada 8. Immigration status and policing in Canada: current problems, activist strategies and abolitionist visions 9. Curated hostilities and the story of Abdoul Abdi: relational securitization in the settler colonial racial state

About the Author :
Sharry Aiken is Associate Professor at Queen’s University’s Faculty of Law and affiliated with the Queen's Cultural Studies Program. She is a past president of the Canadian Council for Refugees, Co-Editor of the PKI Global Justice Journal, and former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Refuge. Stephanie J. Silverman is a researcher, consultant, educator, editor, and scholar. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford (2013) as a commonwealth scholar, served as the SSHRC Bora Laskin National Fellow in Human Rights (2015-2016), on faculty at the University of Toronto for six years, and at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.