Excerpt: How to Close a Camp

Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted with permission from How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, out from Haymarket Books this July.

The Prison-Immigration Knot

By the late 1980s, thanks to over a decade of laws criminalizing immigrants and expanding the camp system, prison and immigration detention industries were operating by their own economic logics. Even in the face of recessions, the prison industry kept growing. Immigration detention was seen by the Reagan administration as “recession-proof.” For private corporations like CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), founded in 1983, immigration de­tention was a financial lifeline. Federal contracts insulated companies from state budg...