The Myth of the Dangerous Mariel

Mark Hamm worked as a prison warden in Arizona before leaving to become a professor of criminology and a prison reform advocate. Ham took the case of people like Alberto Herrera, he saw their immigration files and what he found there didn't square with the received wisdom about the boatlift. Of that number, 120,000 plus, only 350 were found by the INS to have serious criminal backgrounds. That's fewer than one half of one percent of the total number of Cubans who came to the United States via the port of Mariel.