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Crossing Borders and Criminalizing Identity: The Disintegrated Subjects of Administrative Sanctions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Keramet Reiter  and
Susan Bibler Coutin
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Abstract

This paper draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Through putting these contexts and experiences into dialogue, we identify common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-labels immigrants (as deportable noncitizens) and supermax prisoners (as dangerous gang offenders). This re-labeling begins a process of othering, which ends in categorical exclusions for both immigrants and supermax prisoners. As individuals experience this categorical exclusion, they cross multiple borders and boundaries—often against their will—moving from prison to detention center to other countries beyond the U.S. border, and from isolation to prison to “free” society. In both cases, the state action that subjects experience as punishment is civil and, therefore, nominally not punitive. Ultimately, excluded individuals find themselves in a space of legal nonexistence. By examining these common processes and experiences, we argue that a new kind of subject is revealed: a disintegrating subject (as opposed to a juridical or disciplinary subject) whose exclusion reinforces the power of the state.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 567 - 601
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Keramet Reiter thanks those who participated in interviews. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Law and Society Association annual meeting. The authors thank the LSA panel organizers, discussants, and audience members for their comments, as well as the students in Keramet Reiter's Fall 2015 Law and Society II seminar for their critical reading of an earlier draft, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

References

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