ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how borders and interior spaces are configured as being bound by the law – the border as a site of sovereign law and the interior as a site of domestic (i.e. constitutional) law – and yet both are sites of contestation, producing the very subjects they seek to contain or to (dis)empower. Broken Windows policing carves up urban space, often criminalizing the poor for mere occupation of public space and/or performing life sustaining activities. This criminalization is treated harshly as policy makers argue that it will deter more serious crime but in implementing no-tolerance for the very poor, it configures them as criminal based on their status. Similarly, appearance at the border is treated as inherently illegal, despite the fact that mere appearance at the border is legally undetermined. Confinement in a detention center does not reflect illegal entry but rather casts the detainee as criminal and in this way, geographical spaces guided by sovereign power produce and perform the criminal subjects they seek to contain. These forms of criminalization denationalize national territory (as Saskia Sassen would put it) and geographically suspend the law, creating outlawry. This chapter seeks to deconstruct notions of criminality, showing how these paradigms have blurred into one another.
