Who Cares About Immigrant Detention? Ignorance, Brutality and Reasons for Optimism
The latest assault on immigrants and non-citizens will destroy many lives before it is finished. But these attacks will be defeated for precisely the same reason that they are now energized: America has evolved. Join us for a lecture and conversation with Mark Dow, author of "American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons."
Dow’s awareness of immigrant detention began in 1990 when he started teaching English at Miami's Krome Detention Center. Over the next decade, he visited jails and detention centers around the country and interviewed detainees, immigration officers and prison wardens.
In this talk, Dow will reflect on the most significant surprises he encountered in writing "American Gulag" – that the system was even more brutal than many on the outside imagined, and that correctional officers were often the harshest critics of that system. He will also discuss the accidents that led to writing this book as well as the tensions we face today between optimism and realism.
About Mark Dow
Mark Dow's "American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons" was called "a jarring account of a dangerously arbitrary system" by The New Yorker and "required reading" by The Times (U.K.).
Dow is co-editor of "Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime" and the author of "Plain Talk Rising." He was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and he teaches English at Hunter College in New York.