abstract: This dissertation analyzes the transformation of noncitizen detention policy in the United States over the twentieth century. For much of that time, official policy remained disconnected from the reality of experiences for those subjected to the detention regime. However, once detention policy changed into its current form, disparities between policy and reality virtually disappeared. This work argues that since its inception in the late nineteenth century to its present manifestations, noncitizen detention policy transformed from a form of exclusion to a method of state-sponsored violence. A new periodization based on detention policy refocuses immigration enforcement into three eras: exclusion, humane, and violent. When official policy became state violence, the regime synchronized with noncitizen experiences in detention marked by pain, suffering, isolation, hopelessness, and death. This violent policy followed the era of humane detentions. From 1954 to 1981, during a time of supposedly benevolent national policies premised on a narrative against de facto detentions, Arizona, and the broader Southwest, continued to detain noncitizens while collecting revenue for housing such federal prisoners. Over time increasing detentions contributed to overcrowding. Those incarcerated naturally reacted against such conditions, where federal, state, and local prisoners coalesced to demand their humanity. Yet, when taxpayers ignored these pleas, an eclectic group of sheriffs, state and local politicians, and prison officials negotiated with federal prisoners, commodifying them for federal revenue. Officials then used federal money to revamp existing facilities and build new ones. Receiving money for federal prisoners was so deeply embedded within the Southwest carceral landscape that it allowed for private prison companies to casually take over these relationships previously held by state actors. When official policy changed in 1981, general detentions were used as deterrence to break the will of asylum seekers. With this change, policy and reality melded. No longer needing the pretext of exclusionary rationales nor the fiction of humane policies, the unencumbered state consolidated its official detention policy with a rationale of deterrence. In other words, violence. Analyzing the devolution of noncitizen detention policy provides key insights to understanding its historical antecedents, how this violent detention regime came to be within the modern carceral state, and its implications for the mass incarceration crisis. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2018

As policymakers reckon with how the United States became a global leader in imprisonment after World War II, scholars have suggested that the roots of this phenomenon are in conservative backlash to postwar crime or in federal intervention in American cities during the urban crisis. However, historians and social scientists have overlooked the role of jails in the origins story of mass incarceration. Through a close historical examination of Cook County Jail in Chicago, my research addresses how policymakers used reform claims to rationalize the growth of large urban jails from the 1950s through the 1990s. As a massive state building project, mass incarceration was contingent upon branding urban jails as providers of social services and rehabilitation, even though there was proof that jails failed to provide such services and as jail policymakers built bigger and more brutal jails. While activists, lawyers, and prisoners challenged dehumanizing conditions and state violence, jailers responded to public scrutiny by assuring the public that Cook County Jail was in the process of becoming a space that was beneficial to people awaiting trial there. This project locates the emergence of the contemporary carceral crisis in the battle to transform America’s jails. / History

This thesis analyzes the legal history of the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment case law as it relates to the police practice of Stop and Frisk which shifted drastically in 1968 with the creation of the “Terry Stop”. From that decision, it analyzes the broader role that both the Judiciary and Law Enforcement, as fundamental American institutions, played in the creation of the Carceral State. This research draws on archival Supreme Court records to demonstrate that the decision to reinterpret the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures was made in full view of the politicization and racialization of crime. Further, it shows that the Supreme Court both faced and succumbed to the immense pressure that Law Enforcement, lobbyists, and the United States Department of Justice placed on it. In response, the Court created a semantic carveout of the Fourth Amendment that permitted the practice of racially motivated Stop and Frisk, and the confiscation of contraband found during such frisks as evidence of a crime. In doing so, the Court demonstrated its allegiance to Law Enforcement—in the face of significant evidence to the contrary—by continually dismissing arguments that police practices were motivated by negative stereotypes. In legalizing the Stop and Frisk in 1968, the Court empowered Law Enforcement to practices to gradually shift away from the racially motivated police harassment from the Vagrancy Regime of the Jim Crow era to a constitutionally permissible Stop and Frisk regime. This thesis situates the advent of that change in Police Power which brought about this new regime as a primordial cornerstone in the creation of the Carceral State which was characterized by police as the agents who gathered Black bodies from American streets into the justice system.

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