Deportation and the Confluence of Violence within Forensic Mental Health and Immigration Systems

Ameil J. Joseph

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349558261
  9781137513403
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137513410
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

The practices and technologies of evaluation and decision making used by professionals, police, lawyers and experts are questioned in this book for their participation in the perpetuation of historical forms of colonial violence through the enforcement of racial and eugenic policies and laws in Canada.

1

Introduction: Outlining the Problem—The Confluence of Mental Health, Criminal Justice, and Immigration in the Authorization of Deportation

The complexities of the mental health field are representative of the predicament of our present human condition. This complexity demands an acknowledgment of the historical, social, political, physical, and psychological aspects of people that have been created, inherited, and reproduced. The field also demands a consideration of the effects of these understandings of people as they become embedded in policies, practices, disciplines, and the law. An appreciation for this confluence of aspects of the human condition is crucial for an understanding of both the foundations of our wellbeing and the sources of our suffering.

Social workers in the mental health field work in several areas, including areas that require multi-disciplinary and multi-sector involvement (CASW, 2011). A recent Canadian study found that social workers “were accessed third most frequently for mental health care” (Towns & Swartz, 2012, p. 215). When striving toward social justice in mental health, social workers have historically been allies to justice while also participating in historically driven structures that continue institutionalized forms of injustice (Rossiter, 2005). This unique position demands a consideration of how practices, policies, and disciplines can work together to enact violence toward marginalized and oppressed groups.

The practice of deportation for those identified with “mental illness” in Canada is one unique and telling confluence whereby contemporary conceptions, interpretations, functions of discourse, and technologies of “mental illness”, “criminality”, and “race” can be studied through the shared texts of the mental health, criminal justice, and immigration systems. These systems rely on seemingly separate operations in order to continue common violent projects of segregation, confinement, removal, the application of harm to the physical body, and the identification of people as inherently dehumanized.

The decision documents of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada provide exemplary records of deportation decisions for people identified with mental illness who have become involved with the criminal justice system. They are the only known public records on deportation in Canada and include the reflex database of the Immigration and Refugee Board, and the cases that go on to the Federal Court of Canada (Chan, 2005). This research focuses on an examination of the decision documents from the Immigration and Refugee Board’s Appeals Division to answer my research question: how does an understanding of confluence at the site of criminal justice, immigration, and mental health systems illuminate the construction, authorization, and legitimization of mechanisms of state violence through the example of deportation?

The criminalization and deportation of racialized people identified with mental health issues

In 2010, two reports were published on the significant problem of deportation for people identified with mental health issues. A report from the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario highlights that the immigration consequences of the criminalization of people identified with mental illness have not been adequately explored in Canada (Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, 2010). The report also advocates for a fair and just process for addressing issues pertaining to criminal justice, immigration, and mental health (Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, 2010). A Human Rights Watch report was published by the American Civil Liberties Union, also in 2010. The report “Deportation by Default: Mental Disability, Unfair Hearings, and Indefinite Detention in the US Immigration System” outlines multiple systemic injustices that occur within immigration and criminal justice systems for people identified with mental health issues who are deported from the United States (Human Rights Watch, 2010). The report also advocates for fair processes and condemns the use of extended incarceration. The authors indicate that there is a lack of research in this area and that “while no exact official figures exist, the percentage of non-citizens in immigration proceedings with a mental disability is estimated to be at least 15 percent of the total immigrant population in detention—in other words, an estimated 57,000 in 2008” (Human Rights Watch, 2010, p. 2).

The criminalization of those identified with mental health issues (commonly understood as the disproportional representation of those diagnosed with mental illness in the criminal justice system due to a lack of support associated with deinstitutionalization) has been an ongoing problem in Canada as correctional facilities often have more people identified with mental health issues than the general population (Fazel & Danesh, 2002; Peternelj-Taylor, 2008). A recent study found that people identified with mental health issues are represented three times more in correctional facilities (Olley, Nicholls, & Brink, 2009). In a report by the Canadian Mental Health Association, it was noted that “between 2001 and 2002, the number of clients with mental disorders who appeared before the Toronto courts rose from 1800 to 2361—a 31 percent increase. In 2004, 39 percent of these cases involved Class 1 offences [crimes considered the least serious]; 42 percent Class 2; and 17 percent, Class 3” (Lurie, 2009, p. 3). There are enough people identified with mental health issues on any day in Toronto area jails “to fill a psychiatric hospital”, 300–400 people (Lurie, 2009, p. 3).

As the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario’s report documents, in Canada, there is an over-representation of people of color in the criminal justice system (Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, 2010). For Canadians of African descent, the number is three times higher than for white Canadians (Farha, McKay, Neven, & Porter, 2009, cited in Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, 2010). In addition, “black males are more likely to be stopped, detained, and imprisoned upon conviction” (Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System, 1995, cited in Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, 2010). Systemic racism, over-policing, and racial profiling within law enforcement and judicial systems are common among “ethno-racial groups” (Interim Report of the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System, 1994; Jiwani, 2002; Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2003; Wortley, 2004, cited in Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, 2010).

While the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario’s report was a discussion of deportation, there is no mention of what happens to aboriginal Canadian men. It has been established that this pattern of over-representation of racialized groups in correctional facilities in Canada also includes aboriginal men and women (Roberts & Doob, 1997). As Roberts and Doob reported in 1997, Ontario census data revealed a trend in admission rates for black males in Canada to be “6,796 per every ,000 people compared to 1,326 for whites and 3,600 for Aboriginals” (Roberts & Doob, 1997, p. 481).

As a very recent report on federally sentenced women with mental health issues in Canada highlighted, “As of August 2010, there were 512 women serving federal sentences in Canada, of these, 34% (174 women) were Aboriginal” (Bingham & Sutton, 2012, p. 5). While there is no mention of black women in the report, Raimunda Reece’s 2010 dissertation entitled Caged (No)Bodies: Exploring the Racialized and Gendered Politics of Incarceration of Black Women in the Canadian Prison System details that black women in Ontario specifically are admitted to prison at a rate that is seven times the admittance rate for white women (Reece, 2010). The rate of admission for black women in Ontario prisons is also increasing (Reece, 2010).

Also, researchers for the Department of Health in England and Wales reviewed Community Treatment Orders in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, and Scotland as part of a Department of Health project to review the Mental Health Act. Their international review revealed “that relative to the proportion of the general population comprised by their ethnic group, most ethnic minority groups might be over-represented amongst Community Treatment Order (CTO) recipients” (Churchill, Owen, Singh, & Hotopf, 2007, p. 106).

As Barbara Hudson describes,

the general charges against conventional western criminal justice systems in regard to race and gender are that they fail to protect women and members of minority racial or ethnic groups from harms that they suffer in virtue of their gender and/or race/ethnicity and that they discriminate by over-penalizing offenders to the degree that they are removed from the characteristics of white masculinity.

(Hudson, 2006, p. 30)

The practice of deportation of racialized minorities identified with mental health issues is dependent on the structures of criminal justice systems.

In 2009, a law student at York University wrote a Major Research Paper entitled “Sanism and Canadian Immigration System” (Perryman, 2009). In the short paper (26 double-spaced pages of written text), Perryman sheds light on some of the structural and historical concerns at the intersection of immigration and criminal justice systems for people diagnosed with mental illness in Canada. In her conclusion, Perryman begins to make the connection that “[t]he link between mental illness and deportation is not unlike the link between visible minorities and offenders and deportation. What is unique is the lack of attention that it receives” (Perryman, 2009, p. 26). Perryman also recognizes that

the decisions coming out of the Immigration Appeals Division have been disjointed and inconsistent, reflecting the conflict between the historical feelings of those with mental illness and reality. Hence, those with mental illness are faced with a regime, overwhelmed with contradictions and unresolved discrepancies, consistent with Perlin’s sanism.¹

(Perryman, 2009, p. 26)

The systems of identification, incarceration, and removal have a long history of discourses embedded in Canadian policies and law that utilize ideas of perceived genetic, racial, gendered, and sexual difference to control for “types” of people rather than offering support to these populations (Chadha, 2008; Dowbiggin, 1997; LaViolette, 2004; McLaren, 1990; Menzies, 1998). Since the late 1800s and early 1900s, the deployment of dehumanizing discourses (including racial, eugenic, ableist, and mentalist discourses²) have been used in Canada, to rationalize deportation, to refuse entry to Canada, and thus to advance colonial nation building within Canada (for aboriginal peoples) while restricting access to social supports (Chadha, 2008; Dowbiggin, 1997; McLaren, 1990; Menzies, 1998; Roman, Brown, Noble, Wainer, & Young, 2009). This book exposes the concrete operations of power which enact violence rather than offer support.

As a Canadian crime study of immigration status appeal cases revealed, racialized immigrants were deported more often than immigrants from Anglo-European countries (Chan, 2005). While the time period of analysis is not made explicit in the study report, it appears from the reference section that cases were analyzed between 1995 and 2001. The top representing countries based on the number of appeal cases were Jamaica, Iran, India, Vietnam, Guyana, and Trinidad (Chan, 2005). The study illustrated that concerns around criminality rationalize the ongoing regulation and surveillance of immigrants and the threat of deportation ensures their compliance (Chan, 2005).

Robert Menzies details his analysis of “provincial and federal government records and correspondence, institutional documents, print media clippings and patient files” to chronicle “the role of British Columbian provincial authorities and medical practitioners in engineering the deportation of psychiatrically disordered and cognitively disabled immigrants out of the province between Confederation and 1939” (Menzies, 1998, p. 135). Menzies argued

that the deportation of “insane” and other “undesirable” immigrants was nourished by the flood of nativist, rac(ial)ist, exclusionist, eugenist, and mental hygienist thinking that dominated British Columbian and Canadian politics and public culture throughout this “golden age” of deportation.

(Menzies, 1998, p. 138)

Jay Dolmage has demonstrated how the rhetorical construction of disability and race was developed through the policing and limiting of immigration at Ellis Island from the early twentieth century into the 1920s. Specifically, Dolmage argues that through processes of medical inspections and eugenic selection,

Ellis Island, as a rhetorical space, can be seen as a nexus—and a special point of origin—for eugenics and the rhetorical construction of disability and race in the early twentieth century. Importantly, constructions of class, sex, and sexuality were also always part of this racializing and normalizing process.

(Dolmage, 2011, p. 28)

From Menzies and Dolmage, the collaboration of medical professionals, immigration regulators, the policing of borders, and the use of racial and eugenic technologies (such as identification and medical inspection) are revealed for their common purposes for colonial nation and population building.

Remedies of violence

In the recent past, inequities in mental health services (which fail to serve minorities and marginalized groups) have been addressed as an issue of “cultural competence” or a need for more “evidence-based practice” (Hernandez, Nesman, Mowery, Acevedo-Polakovich, & Callejas, 2009; Whaley & Davis, 2007). Researchers have highlighted some of the problems within these solutions including the methodological, epistemological, and political issues that make the project of cultural competence suspect for essentializing culture and having impractical conceptual understandings (Aisenberg, 2008; Whitley, Rousseau, Carpenter-Song, & Kirmayer, 2011). By not paying attention to the embedded Eurocentrism within critical approaches to mental health (which includes a lack of attention to colonization worldwide that relied on technologies of mental hygiene, eugenics, diagnostic categorization, and hierarchies of professionalized knowledge), an opportunity to perceive the violence within these solutions and the genealogy of their basis in modernizing, eugenic, racial thinking is confined.

These contemporary solutions leave the systems intact that seek to taxonomize, finalize, and encapsulate people into a general type, see them through the lens of difference, and develop disciplines, professions, and expertise on the “Other” who is always represented in terms of lack. These contemporary solutions also seek to control difference while at the same time working to identify the existence of the Other, the risk of the Other, and the threat of the Other, thereby constituting its very representation, and constructing the violent Other through the production of discourse. As highlighted by Gayatri C. Spivak, the experiences of certain groups are often rendered invisible through the historical process of systematic oppression and hegemonic writing of history by social elites (Spivak, 1988). The voices of these subaltern groups are then excluded through discursive practices within institutions, disciplines, and academic knowledge. This research recognizes the violence within these forms of oppression and aims to privilege the subjugated perspectives and experiences of marginalized groups through an acknowledgement of the violence experienced and claims forwarded by psychiatric-consumer-survivors or mad people with particular respect to racialized minority groups.

Some of the most violent forms of injustice are often misrecognized or unrecognized in our current mental health system, even though the system itself is the current perpetrator of this violence. Harmful and forced treatments, forced confinement, and the disproportionate deportation of racialized minorities who are diagnosed as mentally ill continue to be regular practices of the mental health system in collaboration with the criminal justice, and immigration systems. These systems have inherited a common ancestry that must be considered within the context of the projects and outcomes of colonization in order to be appreciated for their capacity for violence. The legacy of eugenic thinking, racial hierarchy, and colonial forms of violence become apparent when the common civilizing and respectabilizing mission of colonization is brought to the fore for consideration at the mutually constituting space of criminal justice, mental health, and immigration. In this book, I argue that the disavowal of historical and political considerations and the technologies that remove (or appropriate) the voice of the Other within the forensic mental health system renders invisible the violence of these erasures, their effects, and their participation in neo-liberal and colonial projects.

Research on race and mental illness appears to imply that “immigrants” and racialized minorities are “more prone” to mental illness and experience more discrimination in terms of access to mental health services (Chakraborty & McKenzie, 2002). This occurs due to a tendency in mental health research to reconstitute representations of racialized minorities as distinct from the core of society (Bhui & Sashidharan, 2003). This process can reinforce ideas of racial difference by focusing on individual psychological differences rather than how power disparities operate (Sashidharan, 1993). A critique of the categorization processes of biomedical diagnosis, the forms of treatment applied, the confluence of mental health, immigration, and criminal justice, as well as the historical and political contexts of these issues remain excluded from the research. Experiences of racism are expressed as a lack of equality in access to services, and over-representations in the mental health and criminal justice systems are attributed to the racism inherent in the diagnostic process, the racism of mental health institutions, or the results of racialized minorities living in a racist society (Fernando, 2003, 2010; Fernando, Ndegwa, & Wilson, 1998; Kaye & Lingah, 2000; Metzl, 2009; Thompson, 2005).

An analysis that pays insufficient attention to the broader social, historical, and political contexts of the development of mental health, criminal justice, and immigration systems for colonial and imperial projects that were dependent on unjustified relations of recognition precludes an analysis of the use of dehumanizing discourse, the deployment of racial and eugenics ideas, the participation of disciplines and professionals, and the production of totalized ideas of difference within the systems themselves. As Nadia Kanani has highlighted, “there are few studies that consider the intersections between race and madness, and fewer still that locate these intersections within the social and political contexts of colonization” (Kanani, 2011, p. 1). This research will extend these analyses to address how mental health, criminal justice, and immigration systems participate in the continuation of colonial and imperial projects through the institutional expression of social disrespect (such as dehumanized referents including those with racial/eugenic implications). This book is a contribution to the history of the present.

Charting the course

In Chapter 2, I outline suggestions for an extension to the contributions made in the critical mental health field. When we take a critical look at the history of biomedical perspectives in mental health (i.e., notables include Foucault, Laing, Szasz, Basaglia, and Ingleby) and the highly influential contributions of those who identify with and/or ally with the psychiatric-survivor, consumer-survivor, ex-patient, or mad movements (such as Judi Chamberlin, Irit Shimrat, Leonard Roy Frank, Bonnie Burstow, Geoffrey Reaume, and Don Weitz), we can appreciate the many exposed epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues that (re)produce violence. What is often left uninterrogated is the reliance on a Eurocentric conceptualization of history within articulations of struggle and when attending to the political and social contexts of the critique. The effect of this enduring Eurocentrism is often an inattent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Outlining the Problem—The Confluence of Mental Health, Criminal Justice, and Immigration in the Authorization of Deportation
• 2. The Necessity of an Attention to Colonization: An Addition to Mental Health Literature
• 3. The Canadian Forensic Mental Health System: An Overview
• 4. Conceptualizing the Violence of Deportation at the Confluence of Criminal Justice, Mental Health, and Immigration Systems
• 5. Colonial Continuities and Colonial Technologies of Difference
• 6. A Postcolonial Document Analysis of Confluence
• 7. Historical Data—Archival Artifacts: Deportation and the Enforcement of Undesirability
• 8. Case Studies—The Appeals Division of the IRB: Stories of Resistance
• 9. Confluence: The Untreatable, the Unrehabilitatable, and the Undeserving Alien
• 10. Conclusion: (Re)Producing (Neo)Colonial Relations of Authority and Racial and Eugenic System of Violence
• Appendix: Correspondence from Citizenship and Immigration Canada Regarding the Identification of People by the CBSA for Removal/Deportation
• Notes
• References
• Index