Personally Speaking: “Immigration and Mass Incarceration: Another American Tradition”
Mass incarceration, which is the tendency of a country to criminalize a wide range of offenses, is widely believed to be unfair to the poor and to people of color, while negatively affecting a country’s economic well-being. In the United States, the early 1980s marked a critical turning point for the rise of modern mass incarceration, which costs the country about $182 billion annually to administer and operate. This includes youth detention, territorial prisons, migrant detention, involuntary commitment, military confinement, and other forms of imprisonment. Drawing on critical refugee studies, community archives, and newly available government documents, Tina Shull’s book Detention Empire: Reagan’s War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance demonstrates how migrant detention operates as a form of counterinsurgency, laying the foundations of new forms of carceral and imperial expansion. Yet Reagan's war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance. Shull will discuss her research as part of the “Personally Speaking” published expert series from The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. ￨chess.charlotte.edu
Nov. 14; 5 to 6:30 p.m., with a light reception at 4 p.m.; J. Murrey Atkins Library, Halton Room