“The real guards are the jungle and the sea”: The history of island prisons as landscapes of fear and discipline for migrants, dissidents, and others, from Devil’s Island to the contemporary United States

UC 330

By the 1850s, France established the infamous “Devil’s Island” penal colony in tropical French Guiana, an isolating place of punishment described as “the dry guillotine,” where the commandant would declare, “the real guards here are the jungle and the sea.” Upon being "freed," convicts were required to stay and work to build the "colony." Decades later, France would later send Vietnamese and Algerian political dissidents to the prison, which remained open until 1938. The threat of being sentenced to offshore detention has endured. Refugees crossing the Mediterranean are kept by the European Union on island sites, while Australia has received criticism for its ongoing operation of the migrant processing facility at the island of Nauru. In many of these cases, marginalized people were most likely to be held captive. Engaging with interdisciplinary methodologies and approaches of critical geography and history, this project seeks to trace a history of island prisons—and the people sentenced to live there--from 1850 through the mid-twentieth century. As the US federal government has recently signaled its interest in detaining migrants and convicts beyond its domestic borders in foreign prisons, the inquiry of this project is timely: What might the history of the “exotic” island prison teach us about the use of peripheral environments as a mechanism of punishment?