Podcast: The Challenges Immigrants Face In American Prisons

If you haven't yet, this is a great episode to start listening to Ear Hustle, a podcast made inside Saint Quentin State Prison, in California. Several inmates reveal what it's been like for them, as foreigners, to be behind bars in a system that classifies people into fixed categories. In fact, that is the first question men are asked once they enter the jail: What are you?

David Jassy, a Swedish man born to an African father and white mother had never thought of himself in racial or ethnic terms. Innocently, without knowing what that meant inside America's prison system, he said he was "Black". As a consequence, he had to endure lockdowns that other immigrants who had chosen to classify themselves as "other" did not.

Who you are and who you hang around with in this type of environments, filled with gang members from one place or another, is just one of the things that make a big difference. The other is having citizenship or not.

Phoen You was born in Cambodia and fled with his family from the Khmer Rouge when he was five years old. The first culture shock he experienced in the United States was when the family settled in Utah for the first few years, the second, when they moved to Long Beach, the third one, when he was sentenced to prison after getting involved in a row with a Mexican gang. Although he had refugee status, he never became a citizen and now that he is almost completing his sentence, he could be deported back to Cambodia, although he can't read or write the language and knows no one there. Before deportation, though, he could end up like P.J., another Cambodian inmate who has been waiting for almost two years in one of ICE's facilities, until the paper work comes through.