Carceral Assets: Tracing Carceral Economies of US Noncitizen Detention

Event date
16 March 2022
Event time
14:30 - 16:00
Oxford week
HT 9
Venue
Criminology Seminar Room
Speaker(s)
Dr Lauren L Martin
Abstract: This talk explores the financial practices constituting privatized immigrant detention in the United States, especially how private corrections companies engage with financialised real estate to access the capital necessary for expansion. Locating private corrections in relation to “racial regimes of property” and racialised immigration control, I show how corrections firms repositioned themselves as real estate companies specializing in “unique asset classes.”  Managing carceral real estate is entirely reliant on state contracts, a position that has become increasingly fragile to Black Lives Matter, abolitionist and Defund Police campaigning. I discuss how activists have successfully leveraged reputational risk to block the expansion of Alabama’s prison system in the summer of 2021. In closing, I close by arguing the geographies of contemporary migration control cannot be fully understood without attending to the practices of valuation, exchange and circulation that enable them. 
 
lauren martin
Dr Lauren L Martin is Associate Professor of Political Geography at Durham University. She has published research on family detention, the privatisation of detention and border enforcement, and carceral economies of migration control in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Political Geography, Geopolitics, and other journals. She is PI of the ESRC funded project, GLiTCH: Governing Life through Technology, Connectivity and Humanitarianism, working with Dr Glenda Garelli and Dr Nadine Hassouneh (Leeds), Dr Martina Tazzioli and Dr Aila Spathopoulou (Goldsmiths) and Dr Hanna Ruszczyk (Durham). This project examines how cash transfers and internet dis/connectivity transform refugee governance in Jordan, Lebanon, Greece and the UK. She recently finished an ISRF Political Economy fellowship examining the financialisation of noncitizen detention in the United States, which she will present in this seminar.
 
This is a hybrid event. Please register here. 
 
Organised by
Border Criminologies

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