The Wilson School published highlights from the senior thesis of Sam Dorison ’11 on its website last week in response to the recent media coverage of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility following WikiLeaks’ releases on the topic.
Dorison’s thesis analyzes the correlation between detainee characteristics and the length of their detention at Guantanamo Bay. Among the piece’s conclusions are that a detainee’s citizenship is the most significant factor in determining detention length and that a detainee’s actual level of threat has, at best, a slight correlation with detention length.
Dorison said his thesis advisor, Wilson School professor Kim Lane Scheppele, encouraged him to share his findings in light of the recent coverage.
“Sam’s thesis is not just an excellent thesis — but it also makes news,” Scheppele explained in an email. “Sam is the first person to apply sophisticated quantitative methods to the entire population at Guantanamo, and his thesis explains systematically for the first time what has kept some detainees there while others have been released.”
Scheppele explained that the American government has defended the Guantanamo facility as a place to hold those who pose the largest threat to the United States, but Dorison’s research casts serious doubt on this claim.
Dorison first began working on legal cases concerning Guantanamo detainees during the summer after his sophomore year, when he worked with a defense attorney in Washington, D.C.
Following this experience, he traveled to Guantanamo twice — once in January 2010 and once in February of this year.
“It’s a shocking experience; it’s pretty unimaginable to talk to people who have been detained indefinitely for nine years,” Dorison said. “It’s what drove me to this area of work.”
Dorison said he hopes his thesis and related research will influence government policies in the future and that he hopes to continue to work in this field of study.
He is the former vice president of the USG and a former sports writer for The Daily Princetonian.
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