Joshua B. Hoe interviews Elliott Young about the history of immigration detention and about his book “Forever Prisoners.”
Full Episode
My Guest – Elliott Young
Elliott Young is a professor in the history department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author or co-author of several books and many articles including “Forever Prisoners,” the book that we will be discussing today. In addition, he is the co-founder of the Tepozatlan Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. Mr. Young has also provided testimony in over 200 asylum cases.
Watch the Interview on YouTube
Video of my interview with Elliott Young is available on YouTube
Notes From Episode 119 Elliott Young – Forever Prisoners
The books that Elliott suggested included:
John Pfaff, Locked In
James Forman Jr, Locking Up Our Own
Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, City of Inmates
You can order Elliot’s book “Forever Prisoners” from Oxford University Press or wherever books are sold.
Full Transcript
Josh Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 119 of the Decarceration Nation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; a policy analyst; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Elliot Young about his book Forever Prisoners, about the history of immigrant detention in the United States. Elliot Young is a professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author or co-author of several books and many articles, including Forever Prisoners, the book that we’ll be discussing today. In addition, he is the co-founder of the . . . I’m not gonna say that one right. How would you pronounce it?
Elliott Young
Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas
Josh Hoe
Mr. Young has also provided testimony in over 200 asylum cases. Welcome to the DecarcerationNation Podcast, Elliot Young.
Thank you, Joshua, for having me. It’s great to be on.
Josh Hoe
My pleasure. As usual, I always ask the same first question. It’s kind of a comic book origin story question. How did you get from wherever you started in life to where you were writing a book about immigration and incarceration, or many books about immigration and incarceration?
Elliott Young
That’s a really great question. So I think my interest in Latin America started when I was in college, and it was the 1980s. And there were lots of wars in Central America, which the US government was involved with. And so I got involved with solidarity work, with activism around that, and eventually decided to focus on the border, the place where Latin America and the United States meet, and on immigration and migration, and my previous book was about the mobility of specifically Chinese migrants in the mid 19th, to mid 20th centuries, them crossing borders, from Canada, Mexico, Cuba, to the United States, and back and forth. And in the process of doing that, I got interested in the moments of immobility when migrants got locked down in prisons, or in detention facilities. So I undertook a sort of longer history of immigrant detention in the United States. And that’s what ended up being Forever Prisoners.
Josh Hoe
And do you have an approach that you take towards being a historian or about writing about history? Is there kind of a, do you follow a particular, what’s your way of approaching history when you write about it?
Elliott Young
So I like people-centered histories. I think that most people relate and can identify with people with stories, of individuals or groups of individuals. So I try not to write stories that are just theoretical or abstract or talk only about numbers. Now, when you talk about immigration when you talk about criminal justice, they’re usually lots of numbers. And it’s important to have those numbers to contextualize those stories. But what I tried to do in all of my writing, and in this book, in particular, is to take that broad story that’s really about millions and millions of individuals, and to talk about individual people, individual families, and how they experienced various types of incarceration over the course of the late 19th century up until the present.
Josh Hoe
And there’s always a kind of coming together, not always in a pleasant way, between history and politics. I think one of the ways that we see that right now is in this notion that there are certain kinds of things that people in schools etc. shouldn’t teach or, there’s certain stories that shouldn’t be told. There’s kind of a political attempt to own history. And then there’s also the modernist versus postmodernist feeling about what truth really is, and things like that. I don’t want to get too esoteric, although I probably just did. What’s your approach? How do you navigate that space?
Elliott Young
Yeah. Well, I think history is always contested. Historians understand this. History is about various interpretations of the past based on the available evidence, and reasonable people could have different interpretations of that. But what we try to do in history is base it in actual evidence, so we’re not just giving our opinions on things we’re interpreting, usually documents, but it could also be oral histories. It could be other kinds of evidence from the past. Now, I think you’re right about in the 1980s and 1990s, postmodernism and deconstructionism lead many of us, especially those of us who consider ourselves on the left, to question truth and universal truth. And I think that was an important exercise to understand how truth itself is, is constructed, how narratives are constructed. But I think, you know, the danger now, where we’ve gone sort of Through the Looking Glass, to the other side, is where we’re in this kind of post-truth world, where people just say whatever they want, whether they have evidence for it or not, and things that are demonstrably false, like, you know, Trump’s claims about the election. And, and that’s just accepted. So I think I still hold on to, to certain facts and things that happen, like the Holocaust did happen, that that is a fact. And there, there are other facts that are important now, beyond just establishing the basic facts. There’s a whole range of interpretations and arguments about what those facts actually mean, there could be competing versions of you know, what happened. And I think that what makes history interesting is looking at those competing versions and talking about them. But in terms of ideas, either from the left or the right, of banning certain books, banning certain ideas, I find that a horrible notion and anti-democratic and I think that we need to be able to grapple with, contest, discuss, any and all ideas, even the ones that are demonstrably false. I think we should take those on as well.
Josh Hoe
Your book is called Forever Prisoners, which at least for me, brings to mind some pretty specific prisoners in very specific geography. But your book is about a lot more than the prisoners held in shadow prisons or in Guantanamo Bay. Do you want to talk about your vision for this book? And why you tied it to that name?
Elliott Young
Yeah, well, I’m glad that you made that connection. That’s exactly where the title comes from, the Guantanamo prisoners in particular. And what I was noticing is that through the history of immigrant detention, from the late 19th century through to the present, various groups of immigrants have been caught in indefinite detention basically locked up in prisons or detention facilities. The government has been unable to deport them because they don’t have agreements with the countries where they want to deport them. And the individuals there are essentially, forever will be forever prisoners. Now, eventually, they are either deported or some of them are let out, many of these people end up dying in prison. So they were in that sense, forever prisoners. But I thought it was important to link up the rightlessness that immigrants in the United States experience and the kind of extraterritorial, perpetual imprisonment of, so-called terrorist suspects. And I did that with a little bit of trepidation. Because I think, you know, as soon as you say terrorist suspects, people immediately think of like the worst of the worst. And immigrants one could argue who are coming here for a better life, to escape persecution, should not be in that category. But I think all people should be able to have their claims adjudicated in a court. And what we find in Guantanamo, like we find with immigrant detention, is that they don’t really have, some people don’t have full access to courts or legal representation. And so they’re sort of just accused and assumed guilty and subject to this most extreme form of deprivation of liberty, which is, which is imprisonment. And without access to even the basics of bond hearings, without access to legal redress for their incarceration.
Josh Hoe
If there’s a face or a story of the book or throughout the book, it’s Myra Machado. And during the Trump years, and really somewhat in the Obama years and definitely in the Biden years – we’ll talk about that a little bit later – we heard a lot about why we should deport immigrants who came to the United States and committed crimes while situated in the United States, but the faces deployed to push that narrative, were different than the majority, probably, of the faces who are most often deported. Can you tell us a little bit of the story of Myra Machado?
Elliott Young
Sure. And I would just add that under Obama, even in his second term, when he said, we’re going to focus on felons, not families, which is problematic in a whole lot of ways, even in that second term . . .
Josh Hoe
Sure, because felons and families, both of those things can be true at the same time . . .
Elliott Young
Exactly, both can be true at the same time, but even in that second, his second term, after he said that, the vast majority of people who were deported had no criminal conviction. So it’s used as a way to gin up this deportation regime. But really, the people who are most impacted have no criminal convictions. In the case of Myra Machado, she was brought to the United States when she was five years old by her mother from El Salvador, which was at the time experiencing a civil war, lots of violence. She grew up in California, and then eventually moved to Arkansas. When she was 18 she wrote a couple of hot checks, fraudulent checks, and she was convicted of that. And basically, she did a sort of boot camp thing to get her six months, she was pregnant at the time, the judge sort of looked favorably on her and her future. And that was kind of the end of it. She did her time for that offense. But then 10 years later, in 2015, she was picked up on a traffic violation. And by that point, under Obama, they had expanded the deputizing of local law enforcement as immigration officials. And so when she was picked up on that traffic violation, the ICE deputized officer ran her name through the database and found out she did not have status in the country. And she was put into immigrant detention. And then the issue of her previous criminal conviction came up. And the laws had been from the late 1980s, up until the mid-2000s, basically, increasingly tied criminal convictions to immigration outcomes. So in other words, if you had a criminal conviction, especially one that was considered an aggravated felony, which is something that’s made up in the immigration law, what counts as an aggravated felony, then you are barred from almost all kinds of asylum and this particular charge because she had failed to – even though she had served her time – she had failed to appear in court through some misunderstanding with the courts, it was considered an aggravated felony. And therefore, she was barred from many types of relief. So when I came to hear about her case, which was in 2016, I was an expert witness in her case against deportation. She lost that case. And her lawyer appealed the case. And while the appeal was pending, she was deported back to El Salvador, a place where she hadn’t been since she was five.
Elliott Young
Exactly, for all intents and purposes, she’s the most Americanized person one can imagine in terms of speaking English, accent, attitude.
Josh Hoe
I just always think of it as like being sent to the surface of the moon, as far as she knows. I mean, t maybe she has family there, but it didn’t seem like very much, at least in the way that you explained it. But it’s somewhere she hasn’t been, she doesn’t know people, she doesn’t have connections there. And now she’s being sent there for the rest of her life. It just seems very cruel to me.
Elliott Young
Yeah. And not only that, she had three US citizen children who were left behind in Arkansas with her mother. And so she was separated from, you know, we think about separating families happening at the border. But anytime anyone is sent to prison and certainly deported, they’re seriously separated from their families. So she went to El Salvador. When she got there she was harassed. Her story had been in the Los Angeles Times, it had been in the Salvadoran press. And so she was harassed by officials in El Salvador when she returned, when she was finally living in this community, gang members were threatening her. And, and so given all of those conditions and missing her family, she returned to the United States after a few months, lived with her family clandestinely for a year, and then was finally, on another minor traffic stop, was picked up again, put into, sent to Louisiana put in a GEO-run detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, which is like four hours from New Orleans, in a very remote part, and it was from there that I got a call from her in – I guess it was the spring of 2019 – I get a call from the LaSalle Detention Center, from Myra Machado who was basically at that point representing herself; she had my phone number from when I served as an expert witness and asked whether I would help on her case. And I of course said that I would. At the time, I was writing this book, and I asked whether she would be interested in having her story told, and she was, and then I was able to get her a pro bono lawyer from Loyola University in New Orleans. And so we went through her hearing. And she ended up losing that hearing and losing the appeal, and then it was appealed to the circuit court. And while the appeal was pending, this was in January of 2020, in the middle of the night, they just picked her up and sent her back again to El Salvador, where she has been living since then, now living in San Salvador, and actually helping other migrants, kids who have been left behind, to reunite with their parents. So she’s doing not only that amazing work, but she’s also, through her own case, kind of become a jailhouse lawyer, and is helping her friends who she knew who were in detention, as a kind of paralegal to help them fight their cases. So she’s kind of an extraordinary individual who’s been able to not only fight for her case but tried for other people. But she’s still in El Salvador, her three kids are in Arkansas, she’s separated from them. And I have been trying to work on her pardon in Arkansas because the only way for her to be able to try to petition for asylum is if she gets rid of that criminal charge and conviction.
Josh Hoe
That process can’t even be a commutation, it has to be a full-on pardon. Right?
Elliott Young
I think it has to be a full-on pardon. And first, to do the pardon, she has to pay the restitution. So raise the money to pay the restitution. Got the DAs in Arkansas to agree. Everyone agrees, the bank who’s owed the money has agreed to a certain amount, but because they say the case is so old, they say no, now it has to go like to a civil judge who has to change the order. In other words, the bureaucracy of the criminal justice [system] is such that even if you have the resources, you know, and I’ve got various lawyers working on this, it has been impossible to actually just pay the money to get the restitution, to be able to then follow the rest of the process. So you know, given that, I can imagine people who don’t have access to lawyers and other people advocating for them, basically, it’s a system that’s set up to keep people incarcerated and keep people sort of on the wrong side of the wall.
Josh Hoe
You say at one point in the book that what makes immigrants forever prisoners is not just the indeterminate time they spend locked up, but they often remain vulnerable to detention and other forms of restriction, which I think you just explained an example of, after release; they’re never truly free. non-citizens live in perpetual fear of incarceration and deportation. Why do you think that we’re, to a large extent, for lack of a better term, okay with this as a society? Why have we come to this point theoretically, a nation of immigrants?
Elliott Young
So, you know, a lot of people oftentimes when they look at the statistics about, you know, 1.8 million cases, immigration cases, backlog and all of the dysfunction in the immigration system, they say the system is broken. And another way of looking at it is that the system is working, just as it was intended to work, which is to keep a certain class of people, immigrants, vulnerable, easily exploitable. And, you know, so that they can be paid low wages, and when they’re cheated out of their wages or experience workplace harassment they are afraid to actually fight against it. And so I think it certainly serves certain economic interests, it also serves this interest of creating this vision of a white utopian America without immigrants of color. And that’s who the immigration policies, throughout the 20th century, have been directed against. The deportations have been directed against, over 94% of the people who are deported are black or brown people from Mexico and Central America. So it’s a very targeted kind of policy, targeted enforcement. And I think it’s very clear that it’s based in racial animus, in eugenics notions from the 1920s, which on the surface have been changed in the 1965 legislation, but continued through enforcement to be directed against particular groups of people to construct this sort of white ethnostate in the United States, but also to create a class of easily exploitable labor.
Josh Hoe
So I think many people when they think of immigration, maybe if they’re really savvy, they know about the Obama stuff. They definitely know about the Trump stuff, they might know about the Biden stuff. But before that, I don’t think they see the context of this. One of the things that your book does really well is put everything in a long-term historical context about how this is really a story that’s been told for a while, that’s being told over a long period of time. One of the characters in that book, we were already talking about Myra Machado, I think, is McNeil Island Prison in Washington. Can you start that story with telling us a little bit of the history of Chinese detention?
Elliott Young
So the first – historians argue about this – the first federal legislation directed at immigrants is the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. And that legislation, there’s a general Immigration Act, is very clear that it’s about keeping out Chinese laborers in particular. And so that legislation led to Chinese migrants being picked up and put in detention and eventually deported. But when they first started the system, they really hadn’t created the bureaucracy to do that. So you end up in this prison island off the coast of Tacoma near Seattle, which was set up in 1875. And basically, it’s the only federal penitentiary on the west coast at that time, the first one. So you’re getting people from Alaska all the way down to California, sent to this prison. They start picking them up in the mid-1880s, all of these Chinese who had come across the border from Canada clandestinely, and you’ve got a rise in the mid-1880s of anti-Chinese xenophobic sentiment, purging of towns like in Tacoma in 1885. There’s a famous riot, but it’s all up and down the Pacific Coast. White, oftentimes working-class unions, saying that the Chinese are posing competition to them, and they rise up and forcibly kick Chinese out of their towns. So those Chinese get picked up, they get charged with having entered the country unlawfully or being in the country unlawfully, and they get sent to McNeil Island prison. But what’s interesting is that, at that time, when they get sent there, they get sent there and sentenced to six months of hard labor. That is not immigrant detention. That’s a criminal charge, but they had not had a court hearing, a judicial hearing. And so this raises all sorts of questions for people. The lawyers were looking at this, like how could these people not have had a court hearing and yet they’re receiving criminal sentences. They tried to deport those Chinese to Canada because it was assumed they’d come from Canada. But Canada at that point had a head tax, which charged the Chinese about $50 to come in, and the Chinese didn’t have the money. So the Canadians refused to accept the Chinese. And therefore they were brought back to McNeil Island. And you end up having the Chinese languishing on McNeil Island for years. While the federal government is trying to figure out what to do with them, they eventually begin deporting them all the way back to China. And it’s from there that we begin to see this whole growth of the detention and deportation regime that we know so well today. But in this early period, it was really ad hoc, they were trying to figure it out, they were operating outside of the law. Eventually, the Supreme Court in 1896 steps in and says you cannot give someone a criminal sentence without a judicial hearing. So basically, what they say is, you can put immigrants in detention pending removal. But that is not punishment. That is just like an administrative bureaucratic procedure. What you can’t do is sentence them. So from then on, they begin just putting them in [prison] pending removal.
Josh Hoe
Which is also part of a long history of the court, allowing people to essentially be incarcerated, only calling it something other than incarceration, this is not the only instance of that.
Elliott Young
Right. And we could think, I mean, jails essentially, are mostly filled with people who have not been convicted of a crime, and who end up in jail are poor people who cannot afford bonds or don’t have lawyers to be able to get them out. And, and so yeah, so those forms of detention and criminalizing people before, if ever, they’re convicted of a crime.
Josh Hoe
We’ll talk about this a little bit later. But there’s a person who’s been incarcerated in Illinois for 30 years, who has never been tried for a crime, you know, because of civil commitment laws, which is something that you do bring up in the book. And so there’s this history, I think, along through history of things like this. And I also think, to the second story you tell us about Nathan Cohen, most of us think of mass incarceration, kind of starting in the late 70s or early 80s. But you suggest that there has been mass incarceration ongoing in different ways for a long time, for instance, through mental health facilities, or what are called mental health facilities. Can you talk a little bit more about this?
Elliott Young
Yeah, so I started noticing in doing this research that a lot of immigrants, foreign-born people, were ending up in these, what they would call them at the time, lunatic asylums. And that there was a disproportionate rate of foreign-born people who ended up there. And so I started to look into it. And I was shocked and surprised to learn that, really, in the early part of the 20th century, the vast majority, not just of non-citizens, but of citizens, were incarcerated in mental hospitals, and not in jails or prisons. And so if you look at the rate of institutionalization of part of the population, you’ll see that the rate is pretty much the same in the early 20th century as it was at the end of the 20th century if you include things like mental institutions. And so understanding that I started to look into this case of this Russian Jewish immigrant who had been in Brazil for several years, comes into the United States in 1912, through Ellis Island, ends up in the South in Georgia, in Jacksonville, Florida. And through a series of things that happen in his life, he loses his business, his wife runs away with his best friend, he has a kind of mental breakdown and becomes mute. He is then put into a Mental Hospital in Baltimore, and the immigration authorities come and say, according to the rules, if you were considered insane when you arrived, you’re eligible to be deported. And so he is then brought back to Ellis Island put on a ship to be deported back to Brazil. The Brazilians say, well, he’s not a Brazilian citizen, we don’t want him. They go to Argentina to try to drop him off. They’re the Argentinians don’t want him, he ends up taking the ship all the way back to New York spending several more months in Ellis Island. They try again to deport him, he goes back. Again, he’s rejected, the Russians don’t want him because they’re trying to get rid of Jews at that time from Russia. And so he ends up back in the harbor in New York and essentially is one of these people who was called then in the press, like the Wandering Jew, the man without a country, because no one would want to accept him. Finally, with the intervention of some aid organizations HIAS which still exists, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and the Knights of Pythias, which is a fraternal organization, they agree to pay for his upkeep in a private sanatorium in Connecticut. So he’s let off the ship. And he ends up in that sanatorium in Connecticut. And within a year, he dies. And he’s only like in his mid-30s, and he’s finally buried in Staten Island. So that case just is one example of someone who ends up in part through the process of migration, sort of undergoing this mental breakdown, and then because of that gets deported, but also is unable to be deported. So he’s stuck in this sort of liminal space of indefinite detention plying the seas between New York and South America. And it’s kind of a Kafkaesque story of just this bizarre situation that he was in where, you know, he couldn’t land anywhere, legally. And you know, the only place they would land him was in the prison and Ellis Island.
Josh Hoe
Speaking of Kafkaesque stories, one of the most disturbing parts of the book, in my opinion, although it’s all pretty disturbing, is the story of a person from Japan, who was living in Peru, only to be extradited to the United States in a camp during World War Two. What should people know about the enemy alien program?
Elliott Young
Yeah, so these things, like if you told someone these stories, if someone told me this story, that’d be like, this is fiction, this is crazy stuff. But this actually happened in World War Two, there was an enemy alien program that was organized by the FBI, to go to Latin America, and get the cooperation of Latin American governments to pick up people considered enemy aliens, so Japanese, Germans, and Italians. Now the people who ended up on these lists were not in any way necessarily working with the governments of Japan, or Germany, or Italy, they just happen to be residents there who are of that heritage. And oftentimes, it was their business competitors who would sort of leak their names to the FBI and get them on these lists. They were then forcibly put on ships and brought to the United States. And then when they landed in the United States, their passports had been taken on the ship, they were declared to have illegal entrance because they arrived in the United States without permission to be in the United States. And of course, they arrived in the United States at the point of a gun, not by their choice. So it’s the most bizarre legal reasoning. And they end up in these enemy alien camps in Texas and New Mexico during the war. And even after the war ended, Peru didn’t want to take back the Japanese Peruvians. And so they were kind of stuck in detention. they had the choice of returning to Japan. But Japan, after the war, is not a very likely place that one would want to return to. And many of the people were actually children who were born in Peru, they were Peruvian citizens and Peru didn’t want them back. And so these cases were brought to court. And what the court said is, We have no jurisdiction over what happens outside of the territory of the United States. So if they were kidnapped by the US government, and brought to this country, we have no opinion about that. So as far as we’re concerned, they are illegal. That’s just awesome. Yeah. The courts sort of put on these blinders to what is common sense and say, you know, we can’t look at that, we can’t look at the other thing. And as a result, 1000s of these Japanese Peruvians ended up in detention. Some of them were eventually returned to Japan or some.
Josh Hoe
Am I wrong? There was forced labor involved, too, right?
Elliott Young
Yeah, in these camps, there was labor going on, forced labor. I mean, some of the people refused like …. [Higashita], the person who I sort of focus on; he refused to do work. And I think you could refuse. Many of the other people did work in the camps. And they also use some of those people who were in detention to sort of farm them out to local farms to work as labor there. And in fact, he got cheated, and his family after the war ended up being transferred to Seabrook
farms in New Jersey, which was a food processing plant. So they’re essentially in a private corporate sort of detention facility, where they’re working for this private corporation, but they’re essentially in detention, they’re not allowed to leave that area. And eventually, some of them like [Higashita], get permission, through an act of Congress, to petition to remain in the United States. And so they are able to stay in the United States. But obviously, this history shows the sort of extreme trauma they had experienced. And since then, there have been attempts to seek redress or reparations from the US government, like with the Japanese Americans that were interned, but what the US government said is, you know, the Japanese Latin Americans are, because they weren’t citizens, in a different category. And so they’ve never received compensation, reparations, or an apology or anything.
Josh Hoe
Just to say this again. These are people who are literally just walking around doing their thing in their native country, or their chosen native country of Peru, who because they happen to have the ethnicity that they’re Japanese during World War Two, the US government kidnaps them, brings them to the United States, arrests them for entering the United States illegally at the barrel of US guns, moves them around, some end up on corporate farms, where they have to work. I’m laughing to stop from crying. And then at the end of this wonderful rainbow, then they get to stay in the United States, the country that’s done all this to them.
Elliott Young
I know. You can’t make this stuff up. History is stranger than fiction and the Higashitas end up moving to Hawaii at the end of their lives – after they were in Chicago – and end up moving to Hawaii. in part because I think they had experienced racism in Chicago as Japanese people. And Hawaii was a more welcoming place. But yeah, it’s definitely bizarre. That’s one of the most bizarre episodes in history. And it’s not one that is known about, you know, the Japanese American internment is known about, but this history of Japanese Latin Americans is less well known.
Josh Hoe
Let’s turn to the plight of folks who were involved in the Cuban Boatlift in 1980. The theory of the case is that these were people who were too dangerous. They were basically people who Cuba said were criminals. And so we decided they’re too dangerous to release into the US population. Even though they’re expats from Cuba. Am I following this correctly?
Elliott Young
Yeah, so in 1980 there is an event that happens in Havana where a group of people take a bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy and try to claim asylum and say they want to flee to Peru. What Fidel Castro does is he removes the guards from around the embassies to let 10,000 people flood in, and Fidel says, Great, let’s get rid of, you know, we’re gonna let all these people go. So he calls them escoria, which means scum. And he says, you know, we don’t want these people. They’re criminals. They’re gay, which was considered sort of anti-social by some of the revolutionaries, they’re mentally ill. So there was this idea that Fidel sort of emptied the mental hospitals, emptied the prisons, and allowed these people to leave. So they go get on these boats and land in Florida. In Miami. There’s some truth to some of the people being let out of prison, some people from mental institutions, but it’s largely untrue. So this population gets stigmatized as being . .
Josh Hoe
I imagine some of them were probably just enemies of the state that he wanted to get rid of.
Elliott Young
Yeah, enemies of the state, or people who wanted to escape from Cuba.
Josh Hoe
Which you would think is something we would be somewhat supportive of, given our stance on Cuba as a general rule at this time.
Elliott Young
Jimmy Carter, who was President at the time said, welcome them with open arms, saying come to the United States. But they get largely stigmatized because of those characteristics. This population is also largely black. And unlike the refugees who left Cuba in the early 1960s, who were wealthier and whiter, this is a sort of demographically different population. So the Cuban Americans, the Cubans in Miami, you know, have a very mixed relationship in reaction to this group of refugees. They come in, Reagan takes over, and instead of sort of welcoming them, they’re afraid. And so they put all these people in military bases to process them. And these people end up in detention for several months. Most of them who have connections to family members in the US get paroled. And those ones tended to be the whiter Cubans. The blacker Cubans, the darker-skinned Cubans who didn’t have those connections, don’t tend to get paroled. But the ones who do eventually get paroled into the US.
Josh Hoe
When you say parole, that usually assumes that a sentence has been passed, so when you use that language, I just want to make sure that we understand what the legal situation was for these people at this point.
Elliott Young
Yeah, so legally, they have not committed any crimes, and they actually create a separate category for them as “entrants” for the Haitians and the Cubans, which means they’re considered to have entered the country, but for legal purposes, they’re considered to still be on the threshold of the country. And the reason why they do that is because if you’re on US soil if you’re considered within the United States, you have certain rights. And if you’re considered outside of the United States, you virtually have no rights. And so they wanted to keep them in this position of more rightlessness. So by parole, it means that their immigration status had not been resolved. They’re basically in the process of trying to get an immigration status, but they’re allowed out of detention. In those first few years of the 1980s, a certain number of them, 1000s of them end up with criminal convictions. Most of those criminal convictions are low-level drug possession charges, like having cocaine. Some of them are assaults,and there are very few, a number of more serious, violent crimes. So those people have served their time on their criminal sentences. And when they get out, they are no longer eligible for achieving immigration status based on those criminal charges. So they’re put back into prison. Most of them end up in Atlanta Penitentiary. And they’re basically pending deportation, but because of the relations between the US and Cuba, says they won’t accept these people back. And so these people have served whatever criminal you know, time they were given, but are continuing to be held in prison in a penitentiary, along with other people who have been convicted of crimes and for an indefinite sentence. And so in the Atlanta Penitentiary, they begin to organize and petition for their freedom. And they’ve come, many of them with very anti-communist beliefs, thinking that the US is the land of freedom and liberty. And they’re petitioning like Dear Mr. Reagan, please free us, and their sort of illusions about what the United States was supposed to be confronts the reality of being locked up in a penitentiary in Atlanta with without access to freedom and without access to protection from the law. So, in 1987, eventually the US government negotiated an agreement with the Cuban government to accept them back, just over 1000 of these people. Word gets out in both Atlanta Penitentiary and Oakdale, Louisiana, where there was another detention center, that this agreement has been made, that they’re on the verge of being deported. And they organize almost simultaneously in both of these prisons, detention centers, an uprising, they take over the prison, more than 100 guards are held hostage. And this becomes the longest-lasting prison uprising in the history of the United States. In Atlanta, it lasted for about two weeks. One of the Cubans was shot in the first hours, shot and killed in the first hours of the protests. None of the hostages were harmed. So it ends relatively non-violently after the US government agrees to hear each of their cases individually, so all they’re asking for is basically a review of their case, to be able to petition for asylum to stay in the United States. And eventually, more than 1000 of them get deported back to Cuba. Others are able to remain in the United States. But today, some of those same people who remained in the United States still don’t have immigration status. So at any time, they could be picked up and deported. And in fact, after Obama sort of opened up relations, again, with Cuba, they began to pick up more and more Cubans and put them into deportation proceedings. So it’s a real fear on the part of these people who’ve been in this country now, for what, 40 years, and could be deported to Cuba at any moment.
Josh Hoe
So let’s start putting a little of this into a larger context. So we’ve got, behind the book, in a sense, are the people at Guantanamo Bay. They’re not necessarily a big part of the book. But they’re a part of the book, I would have to say, at least, the people who still haven’t been charged or are sitting there, there’s been no process. You’ve got all of these different stories, you tell them the book, then you also mentioned the folks who are in civil commitment, who are generally US citizens, but are at places like McNeil Island or Moose Lake in Minnesota. And, how would you, if you’re trying to give the 1000 foot view, how would you put all this in context?
Elliott Young
Yeah, I think the point of this is in looking at these various types of detentions, including civil commitment, including what’s going on in Guantanamo, immigrants, other people in prisons and jails is to think more broadly about people who are incarcerated against their will. And when you start to do that, you realize that all of these stories are connected to the immigrants who are at Atlanta Penitentiary, it’s no different for them, then for someone who is a US citizen who has received a criminal conviction and ends up in Atlanta Penitentiary. In fact, the US citizen has more protections than the immigrant who doesn’t have any criminal conviction, because at least if you’ve got a criminal conviction, the government has to provide you a lawyer, maybe not a good lawyer, but a lawyer. So the 1000, or 30,000 foot view is that if we’re trying to think about mass incarceration and decarceration, we have to think about the various ways in which people are locked up. And so thinking beyond the citizen/non-citizen divide, thinking also beyond the borders of the United States, where are the prisons where people outside the United States are being locked up by the United States? Or if we think about immigrants, the US now is paying countries like Mexico and other countries in Central America, to detain and deport Central American migrants and other migrants. So the US basically is outsourcing its whole prison system to the rest of the world. And so if we think about all of that together, I think, then we could hopefully – for those people who believe in decarceration, and abolition – come up with more effective strategies, because otherwise, what happens is the government will just find a new way to incarcerate people. So in the beginning of the 20th century, it is mental hospitals, then they start closing down the mental hospitals. And then people are put into jails and prisons, or now what’s happening recently is immigrant detention; and to citizens, so-called “alternatives to detention”, ankle bracelets, other forms of technological surveillance, so the prison then moves outside of the prison. So if you don’t keep all of these nefarious ways that the state is trying to lock people up, then reforms could end up becoming the new incarceration.
Josh Hoe
I think another thing that I get from the book, as I often suggest to people, is that your rights don’t really matter when they aren’t being put at risk. And we’ve heard a lot of talk over the last few years about how now democracy is at risk. And what I think the story your book tells us is, in a sense, elements of what we’re supposed to deeply believe in, have been in play the entire time, and have been undercut with our full willingness in a lot of cases, in a lot of different ways, both in terms of the way we treat people who maybe don’t have full constitutional protections, and in some cases, the ways that we treat people who are supposed to have full constitutional protections, but that there’s a line that goes through all of them kind of a dark underbelly to what people call in a positive way, “the rule of law” that allows a lot of the excesses that we believe are probably impossible in our system. Is that fair?
Elliott Young
Yeah, and I think the immigrants are, in some sense, the canary in the coal mine. And we could see that too, with citizens, black and brown citizens, other poor citizens, who’ve been subjected to the criminal justice system and incarceration, that it’s easy to talk about the good immigrants; the bad immigrants are the criminals, and the law-abiding people, but the rights that are taken away from those other people, eventually, those rights erode for the so-called good people, the citizens, the law-abiding people, so if we really have even self-interest in maintaining these democratic rights, in maintaining the rights of liberty, and some modicum of justice, then we have to be concerned about the people who are experiencing the rightlessness today. And I think, you know, what we could see is that creep, from either, you know, whether we’re talking about black people in the late 19th, early 20th century, or we’re talking about immigrants, that those experiences of rightlessness, of arbitrary use of the law, eventually, will seep into the general society. And yeah, and then when you turn around, all of a sudden democracy is very fragile and is at risk. But it’s like, if we’d been paying attention all along, we would have realized that we’ve got to shore up these democratic institutions for everybody, especially the least among us.
Josh Hoe
Well, I also think that at some level, what this is supposed to be, is about inherent things that are true about every single being in the universe; every human being in the universe, you know, that they have certain rights that are inalienable. Now, we may say the Constitution doesn’t extend to those, but I don’t see how you can believe in that principle, and not be destroyed by what happened to Myra, or what happened to some of these other people. Because, regardless of what we say the law means, at the core of it is this idea that there are certain things that we should care about when we deal with other human beings. And we’re saying in essence, that the law can trample on those very things that the law was designed to protect, regardless of who the person is or where they come from. Is that fair?
Elliott Young
Yeah, basically what we’ve done is carved out groups of people who are not protected by these same constitutional rights or in the case of citizens, you know, are protected in theory. But then in actuality, if you don’t have money, you don’t have access to good legal counsel. And the way that the laws themselves have been created, you end up, those people end up spending more time behind bars. Prisons are not filled with wealthy people, prisons are filled with poor people. And it’s precisely because those people don’t have access to legal representation, to the protections that theoretically exist for all of us. But in fact, they don’t. And, you know, we have to think about the front end, which is the policing side of this; who is targeted for policing, who is targeted for the kind of arrests, largely arrests for low-level offenses, or are not people on college campuses or people living in wealthy suburbs, it’s people in poor communities, largely black and brown, who end up being subjected to those arrests, and then get funneled into the criminal justice system, which leads them to plea bargain and have records, which ends up leading them to spend years and years behind bars. And so, as you know, there was some progress because of all of the efforts of activists to decarcerate in the United States, but we’re actually seeing at the federal level, that craft going in the opposite direction now under Biden.
Josh Hoe
In both regular US citizen incarceration, and also in immigration enforcement, my understanding is that it’s actually increased, that detentions have increased quite a bit under Biden, which is a bit strange, given that one of the main departure points, I think, for many people, was that Biden was going to be different than Trump on immigration. Am I crazy here?
Elliott Young
No, you’re not crazy. The system is crazy. That’s certainly what we thought and hoped. But I think, as my book shows, and other people have shown, anti-immigrant policies have been bipartisan, you know, for a long time. So Democrats and Republicans. And although the rhetoric, Biden’s rhetoric is certainly better than the anti-immigrant xenophobia we heard from Trump and Stephen Miller, on the ground, detentions are actually up from the end of the Trump era, due to Biden. And he’s been a huge disappointment, I think, on immigrant rights, and on, you know, continuing the terrible policies of Trump in terms of Title 42, which is basically just expelling people without any access to apply for asylum based on [this putative health concerns], or the Remain in Mexico policy, which has been reinvigorated, in part because the courts have demanded it. But yeah, I mean, Biden has not, has not really turned 180 degrees, and in many ways, has continued a lot of the same policies that were true under Trump, true under Obama. And it’s just gonna take a lot of continued activism. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who were incensed when Trump was doing it, now that Biden is in power, and is, is speaking in more polite terms, they’re not as focused on the what’s going on on the border, what’s going on in terms of immigrant detention, and so it sort of fades. And without that sort of pressure on the street, I think a lot of the bad policies will continue.
Josh Hoe
And I think we’re about to see – one of the questions I’m asking this year is that we’re seeing this come across as a “tough on crime” narrative dominating 2022. How do you, and what you just said, is a microcosm of I think what’s happening, which is the right demagogues on tough on crime, and the left instead of saying you’re wrong, and here’s the reasons why says no, no, we’re really tough on crime. And they double crackdown just to show how tough they really are. Do you have any kind of theories on how people can respond to this? This is the question I’ve been asking this year so far, is how people can respond through this election cycle, and in the face of things like the homicide spike we talked about earlier?
Elliott Young
So I think we have to be really vigilant about the way the media portrays certain elements of crime, like the spike in homicides going up, and be clear that the data shows that overall violent crime is at a 30 year low. And even in the cities like Portland where you do have the spike in homicides, violent crimes are actually down overall year over year from 2021 to 2019. And so the data just doesn’t support this narrative. But there is a narrative being pushed by the media and politicians that things are out of control. Portland is on fire, Antifa is running . . .1
Josh Hoe
New York’s on fire, San Francisco is on fire . . .
Elliott Young
All these places are on fire. It’s simply untrue. And anyone who lived through the 1980s will remember this, there was a lot of law and order discourse [and] hysteria about crime. And so, I think that we have to try to bring the data to say, what is the truth about this picture, but also to focus on the solution. So how are we going to solve the very real problems of social dislocation, immiseration, homelessness?
Josh Hoe
According to them, you just arrest everybody or deport them.
Elliott Young
They’ve got their answer, which is more police and more incarceration. More deportation. I think the answer that many other people have given is that we need to solve the upstream problems that are causing these social problems. And so thinking about alternatives to the police, that are unarmed, and that actually try to solve people’s problems instead of increasing their problems. And we’re pushing that, a lot of people have been pushing that in Portland and other cities across the country. But I think we’ve had limited success because I think this narrative now of out-of-control crime is going to, is justifying increasing police budgets and doing the same things which got us to the situation of mass incarceration in the first place. So we’re at this moment when we need to double down on what we know is the alternative or the transformation from what we have, and not return to the same old solutions, which always end badly.
Josh Hoe
People really liked last year that I was asking this question, so I’m bringing it back this year. I’m asking if there are any criminal justice-related books that you’ve read recently that you might recommend others. If you don’t have any, that’s fine, too. 2
Elliott Young
Yeah, there’s so many books, just looking back here. But John Pfaff’s work; James Forman.
Josh Hoe
Both have been podcast guests. So I like that.
Elliott Young
There’s also this global book, looking at global policing, by Stuart Schrader, who is trying to understand the connections between policing in the United States and how that policing is exported, globally. So I think that there is amazing scholarship coming out on criminal justice, and the history of policing, the history of a prison. So we’re in sort of the golden age of that. Unfortunately, it’s responding to this terrible situation we’re in. But the other person who’s a favorite of mine is Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, a historian who wrote this book City of Inmates about the long history of incarceration in Los Angeles, going all the way back to when indigenous people were in that area, all the way up to the present and looking again, at the variety of ways people are incarcerated for immigrant detention, political radicals, and then people who are considered just criminals.
Josh Hoe
And where would you recommend it’s best for people to find your book?
Elliott Young
So if you go to Oxford University Press, you could order it directly from them, if you want to avoid lining Jeff Bezos’ pockets. Or your local bookstore, but yeah, it’s readily accessible. And I think there’s an electronic version, there’s even an audiobook version which I have not listened to, but people are welcome to listen to it. And I just want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk about it and anyone else who wants to talk about it, I’m always eager to share.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question, what did I mess up? What question should I have asked but did not?
Elliott Young
You’ve not messed up at all. It’s like, if my air pods wouldn’t have fallen out, I guess that would have been . . . You can’t prevent that. No, it’s great to have this conversation with someone who is so sort of steeped in this work and the longer history of mass incarceration. So I just want to thank you for the opportunity.
Josh Hoe
Oh, and thank you so much for doing this. It was a real pleasure. And I really enjoyed the book.
Elliott Young
Great. Well, hopefully, we’ll continue the conversation.
Josh Hoe
Now, my take.
I’ve said this many times before, people behind bars are people behind bars. And what we should care the most about is not where those people are from, or what those people have done. But we should care the most about how we treat those people entrusted to our care. How they treated others is on them, and they have to be accountable for what they did. But how we treat them while they are in our care is on us. And no amount of rationalization about why people deserve punishment will absolve us of that moral responsibility that we all bear, because we are members of the society that creates and accepts that punishment. And when it comes to the stories of families torn apart, people sent back to some country that they never even lived in, because the letter of the law is more important than the spirit of the law, or people who never did more than violate a traffic law stuck in facilities for years, simply because they were here illegally, I fear that our karmic debt as a society grows beyond anything we could ever payback. I hear a lot of politicians talking about what a great country we are. And in some ways, a lot of ways, that is probably true. But in my opinion, a great country would never split a mom from her kids and send her to a country where she’s never lived, at least not for decades prior to her deportation over a traffic ticket. And a great country would never ever kidnap people in another country and incarcerate them because they happen to be of a nationality we were suspicious of, or in conflict with. I don’t want to sound like I don’t believe in America, I do. I deeply believe in our ideals. That’s a lot of why I do this podcast. And every once in a while, while we do some things that are amazing, I just think we have to deeply reflect on the massive difference between our ideals and our laws, and the difference between our ideals and the enforcement of our laws. And I think we have to stop trying to erase the bad things that we’ve done from our history and instead be accountable for them. We tell people who have committed crimes like myself, that we need to be accountable. Well, like us, Americans need to be accountable to and need to live up to the ideals, the idea that every human being should be treated with dignity at all times.
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