Imprisoning Families

In the March 3rd issue of The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot investigates the stories and history of the T. Don Hutto Family Immigration Detention Center near Austin, Texas. The Center — euphemistically named, as it is actually a prison — houses immigrant families who have pending asylum applications or who are awaiting deportation. The Center is owned by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a private prison corporation (T. Don Hutto, former director of corrections in Arkansas, was also a founder of CCA).

Though the article is ostensibly about the negative impacts of incarceration on children and infants, Talbot indirectly addresses — and I would have liked to see this done more directly — the harms done to families as a whole. It seems that children’s health and ability flourish is directly impacted here by their inability to live their lives with their families, the ones they love, free of intrusion and coercion by a state that is not their own. This then means that their parents, too, are unable to care for their children in the way they wish, to nurture and sustain relationships with their partners and their loved ones beyond the prison walls, and to adequately empower themselves to fight their cases. Their hands are literally tied behind their back. It is the impact of this horrific experience on families — however small, large, traditional or not they are — that most concerns me about this place. This is particularly because many of these families have not actually been charged with a crime. They are simply awaiting a decision about whether they can seek asylum in America — a place that they have come to perhaps in part because George Bush’s cries of the ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that America offers have resonated across the world in recent years.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the CCA and the Hutto Center, and was able to reach a settlement to make the conditions at the center more humane for children and families. This is a good step, but isn’t there a danger here in making the prison a better place while not simultaneously challenging the very policies that make such a place possible? The incarceration of children and their families with pending immigration cases is wrong; the profiteering by the CCA off places like Hutto is wrong; the immigration enforcement policies in America, which treat people like caught fish, without acknowledging their dignity and agency, are wrong.

For more on this detention center, in an article that appeared in February 2007 in the New York Times, see here.

Juvenile Justice in Africa

I’ve recently been interested in exploring the tensions between the enactment in 1989 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child and the decline in the conditions of children worldwide that have occurred as a result of the structural adjustment policies that began with neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s.  I was perplexed by the fact that though all but two nations ratified the Convention (Somalia and the United States were the exceptions), and many states proclaimed interest in protecting the rights of the child, few states in practice actual follow the terms of the Convention, particularly with respect to children’s rights in legal procedures.

While researching the Convention, I learned that government officials in Mozambique adopted the terms of the Convention fully into their national laws, recognizing that the stated claims of the Convention could be used to eradicate child poverty.  The rights of children could be interpreted as the rights to live happy and healthy lives, free of poverty.

Assuming that Mozambique’s unique interpretation of the Convention might result in unique juvenile justice practices, I began to look for information about their juvenile justice system.  Sadly, the results of my search were depressing.  I found this article from The New York Times which looked at the conditions of young offenders in a number of African nations, and found that despite the fact that many of these nations had ostensibly strict allegiance to the tenets of the Convention, young offenders suffer terribly in these nations.

Though I am reluctant to generalize about African nations, I write about this issue more broadly to try to suggest that the disjuncture between several of these nations’ stated desires to eradicate child poverty and their inability–as a result of structural dependence on global bodies like the World Bank–to resolve the problems of poverty.  The negative side-effects of structural adjustment policies, which withdraw money from public institutions and focus on private investment, among other things, is to pull money away from institutions that serve women and children in particular, like schools, hospitals, and, as we see, prisons.  Though I don’t want to suggest that prisons should benefit from public spending entirely–in fact, I believe that public investment in resolving social inequality may have a kind of ‘trickle-down’ impact on crime–I do think that global economic policies propagated by developed nations prevent countries like Mozambique from acting autonomously to develop policies consonant with their goals.

To read more about child justice in Africa, see here.