Decarceral Futures: Bridging Immigration and Prison Justice towards an Abolitionist Future

Abstract

This special issue focuses on what a standpoint of carceral abolitionism brings to citizenship studies, with immigration detention as the key case study. The nine articles and editorial introduction probe the intersections of detention with current and potential forms of citizenship. The contributions collectively emphasize what citizenship studies also documents: similar to how the prison is a site of social control, immigration control is a nation-building site where access to permanent status and citizenship is closely filtered along racial, gender, class, ableist, and other lines of discrimination. Employing a plurality of case studies spanning North America, Europe, and Asia, and coming to the subject from a spectrum of interdisciplinary backgrounds, all contributors nonetheless foreground the recognition that deprivation of liberty is one of the most serious harms that someone can experience. Like the activists protesting police brutality around the world, the special issue contributors are thinking across the spectrum of de-funding policing, overhauling the ‘criminal justice’ system, eradicating prisons (penal abolitionism), and doing away with all forms of containment (carceral abolitionism). The collective findings reaffirm that neither the prison nor the detention centre are inevitable in the modern, democratic order. Abolishing all forms of immigration detention would open the door for the emergence of new visions of justice.