Immigration Detention Inc.

The Big Business of Locking up Migrants

Nancy Hiemstra, Deirdre Conlon

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Paperback

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English

Pluto Press
20 June 2025

Social discrimination; Migration, immigration & emigration; Police & security services; Penology & punishment; Political structures: democracy

The United States has the most extensive immigration detention system in the world, expanding from a capacity of less than 5,000 detainees per day in the 1980s to 52,000 by 2019. While the most vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric may be attributed to Republicans, US detention infrastructure has grown exponentially regardless of the political party in power, as reports of abysmal detention conditions pile up.

Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon provide a damning exposé of the ways immigration detention generates income while those detained are starved, sickened, and exploited as a matter of routine detention operation. Drawing on over a decade of research and focusing on detention centers in New Jersey and New York, the authors map public-private financial relationships and trace how detention contracts for food, medical care, and in-facility stores are fought over to the penny. By dissecting the inner workings of immigration detention, they show a system governed by a capitalist logic that produces sickening and corrupting dependencies in communities across the US.

Coming at a pivotal social and political moment, Immigration Detention Inc. makes the case for dismantling immigration detention regimes everywhere.

By: Nancy Hiemstra, Deirdre Conlon
Imprint: Pluto Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 16mm
ISBN: 9780745349466
ISBN 10: 0745349463
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 20 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Nancy Hiemstra is a political geographer whose research focuses on US immigration enforcement policies. She is the author of Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime and co-editor of Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention. She is Associate Professor at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, US. Deirdre Conlon is a critical geographer working in the US and Britain. Her work focuses on how immigration and border controls are proliferating as they are monetized. She is co-editor of Intimate Economies of Immigration Detention and Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention. She is Associate Professor based at the University of Leeds.

Reviews for Immigration Detention Inc.: The Big Business of Locking up Migrants

'In this shocking exposé of conditions in US immigration detention facilities, Conlon and Hiemstra reveal the high costs of privatisation—most obviously for those who are detained but also for the wider US society. Much of what is described is unfathomable: rotting food; failure to treat basic medical problems; gynaecological procedures undertaken without consent. Such matters are not exceptional, they are 'business as usual', the system working as designed. As states around the world turn with ever greater enthusiasm to immigration detention, this book offers a stark warning of all that will be lost in the process' -- Mary Bosworth, Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford