Our own ‘Gulag’s’ shameful story

American Gulag

Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons

Mark Dow

University of California Press:

414 pp., $27.50

*

Mark Dow tells the disheartening and outrageous story of the way thousands of men, women and sometimes children are held in U.S. immigration prisons indefinitely, sometimes for years.

For some, their only offense is trying to establish a new life in the United States. Others are caught up in various law enforcement nets that sweep the country in a vain attempt to enforce immigration laws that reflect the nation’s ambivalent attitude toward immigrants and the solidity of its borders.

Dow’s “American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons” comes at an opportune time, just as the U.S. Supreme Court has restrained the Bush administration’s assertion of broad executive power over people captured in Afghanistan, Iraq and even the United States in the name of the war on terror.

But the immigration prison system is not an invention of the Bush administration. It has been in place for at least 25 years, since the Mariel boat people arrived from Cuba and the U.S. government had to find a new way to handle immigrants who had reached these shores irregularly. Some of the Mariel people were criminals, released by Fidel Castro as a provocation. Dow details how some are still imprisoned by a government unsure what to do with them.

Dow has talked with U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials, detainees and their lawyers and advocates at various detention centers around the country. The picture he draws is one of ineptness, confusion and incompetence, laced from time to time with sadism and cruelty. The stories and photographs from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison may be surprising in their intensity but not their essence for those with some knowledge of U.S. prisons, including those of the INS.

Dow’s findings suggest that the clearly dysfunctional system for handling immigrants who are here illegally or who have broken some other criminal laws reflects the uncertainty and conflicting desires of several successive administrations and Congress on immigration.

As a nation, we have no policy. We may take into custody some people who are here illegally, but more often we happily employ them. They contribute mightily to the country’s economic well-being, but we encumber them with the threat of arrest and swift deportation or, as Dow shows, a long languishment in detention jails. But he does little summing up and offers scant guidance on how to view this complex subject. The reader is left to puzzle it out.

Dow’s method is one that has become all too common in the nearly 40 years since the advent of the “new journalism” in the 1960s brought the writer into his work as an actor, not just an observer. In the hands of a master like Norman Mailer, whose account of the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon surpassed all conventional newspaper descriptions, the new technique was a revelation. From the pens of most everyone else, it is just a distraction. Dow tells us at great length how frustrating it was to get his stories and how uncooperative officious bureaucrats were. So what’s new? What we need from a reporter is a steady hand to guide us through the complexities of a difficult issue.

In Dow’s case, the subject is important, and it is deeply disturbing to all who want to see the U.S. apply justice that is worthy of the name. Still, despite his tangled telling, Dow’s book does the nation a distinct service in setting out the nature of the problem.