Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance, edited by historian Robert T. Chase, is a volume in the University of North Carolina Press's Justice, Power, and Politics series and is the product of a decade of collaboration under the auspices of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. [End Page 117]

Chase pens a smart, useful introduction framing the interpretive and historiographical position of Caging Borders and Carceral States. He leans heavily into Foucault's notion of carceral archipelagos, which are networked regimes of social control. Chase argues that the historical literature on incarceration in the United States centers on the Northeast and ignores the South and West as well as issues of race. Refocusing scholarly attention geographically to the Sunbelt means that this collection "places the history of racial oppression and resistance at the very center" of its interpretive contributions, according to Chase (5). These essays re-envision what might seem disparate kinds of policies—crime, immigration, reproductive rights, voting—as instead interconnected manifestations of an overarching carceral network. As Chase notes, "the historical connections and intersections that these essays uncover might well serve as a crucial link between otherwise isolated people struggling against this system seemingly alone … stranded on their own carceral archipelago" (38). This volume's very act of connecting linked oppressions is itself a kind of resistance.

While space does not permit a full description of the book's fourteen essays, a cursory examination reveals how varied they are. In the first section on the U.S.–Mexican borderlands, Daniel Manuel Hernández examines technology in migrant detention, Ethan Blue provides a fascinating exploration of deportation trains in the early twentieth century, Kelly Lytle Hernández unearths U.S. incarceration policy's impact on the Mexican Revolution, and George T. Díaz crafts an impressive social history of Mexican-origin prisoners in the Blue Ridge State Farm of Fort Bend, Texas. In the second section on southern labor and gender, Talitha L. Le-Flouria powerfully examines the shocking oppression of imprisoned Black women through the denial of their reproductive rights, Pippa Holloway studies the restoration of voting rights to formerly incarcerated women, and Vivien Miller examines Florida's use of prison labor for state roads. In the third section, about the rise of the prison industrial complex, Heather McCarty analyzes California prison gangs in the 1960s, Volker Janssen explores the politics of prison construction and mass incarceration, Keramet Reiter historicizes the origins of supermax prisons, and Donna Murch castigates Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council for racist criminal justice policies of the 1990s. In the fourth section, on resistance, Dan Berger provides an excellent account of California prison activist George Jackson, while Douglas Miller intriguingly interprets U.S. incarceration policy toward Native Americans as a form of "Settler Custodialism" (385).

There is little negative to report about Caging Borders and Carceral States, but the lack of a conclusion that concisely consolidates the book's intellectual contributions is unfortunate. And the topical overlap among essays is repetitive. On the whole, however, the collection is strong and holds together. [End Page 118] The essays by Chase, Blue, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Díaz, LeFlouria, McCarty, Berger, and Miller were particularly outstanding. Texas historians should focus on Díaz's essay, a fascinating construction of a prison community that echoes classic slavery studies in its emphasis on cultural resilience and agency amidst extreme physical violence and mental cruelty. Robert T. Chase's Caging Borders and Carceral States is a challenging and intelligent anthology. In this moment of widespread debate over reforming the criminal justice and immigration systems, this work is sorely needed. [End Page 119]