Content area
Full Text
Making Visible What Is Purposely Hidden
Author Mark Dow writes about what happens, but is usually unseen, in immigration prisons.
American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons Mark Dow University of California Press. 426 Pages. $27.50.
Mark Dow's compelling book is a voyage into the heart of darkness that is the United States's immigration prison system. "American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons" reveals everything that the nation's immigration authorities don't want you to know about "a particular American prison system ... with an astonishing lack of accountability, not only to outside criticism, but to the rest of government as well." While much of what Dow documents happened under the watch of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), he makes a convincing case that the secrecy and abuses of immigrant inmates have only worsened since 9/11 and under the new Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is the Department of Homeland security agency now in charge of locking up immigrants.
Dow's interest in immigration prisons began at a place I know well. As a part-timer for Miami's public school system in 1990, he taught a high-school equivalency course at the Krome detention facility, a notorious immigration prison on the edge of the Everglades. At the time, The Miami Herald had published stories written by Deborah Sontag (now of The New York Times) that exposed rampant sexual abuse of female inmates by Krome officers, among other ill treatment. Though immigration officials had denied Sontag access to...