Crimmigration: The Missing Piece of Criminal Justice Reform
Abstract
This article discusses the impact that the incorporation of migration enforcement has had on the criminal justice system and the way in which it has exacerbated pre-existing problems within it. Part I discusses the drastic expansion of the criminal justice system over the last forty years and the fiscal and moral costs it has had. Part II discusses how crimmigration has impacted the criminal justice system, its laws, policies, and practices during the last thirty years. Part III discusses the rise of the Smart on Crime movement and the goals of the criminal justice reform efforts to combat its detrimental effects. Part IV highlights the ways in which immigration control enforcement within the criminal justice system continues to perpetuate the system's negative moral and fiscal costs. It concludes that the moral and fiscal costs, caused by the use of the criminal justice system in its expanded role in migration enforcement and control, will shift the system's well-documented injustices to another "finely targeted" group of individuals and fail to decrease the cost and negative impact of criminal justice reform efforts.