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Inside Immigration Detention

Online ISBN:
9780191755552
Print ISBN:
9780199675470
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Inside Immigration Detention

Mary Bosworth
Mary Bosworth

Reader in Criminology and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford and, concurrently, Professor of Criminology, Monash University Australia

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Published online:
23 October 2014
Published in print:
18 September 2014
Online ISBN:
9780191755552
Print ISBN:
9780199675470
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Based on fieldwork conducted in six immigration removal centres (IRCs) between 2009 and 2012, this book draws together a large amount of empirical data including detainee surveys and interviews, staff interviews, observation, and detailed fieldnotes. From this, the book explores how IRCs identify their inhabitants as strangers, constructing them as unfamiliar, ambiguous, and uncertain. In this endeavour, the establishments are greatly assisted by their resemblance to prisons and by familiar racialized narratives about foreigners and nationality. However, as staff and detainee testimonies reveal, in their interactions and day-to-day life, women and men find many points of commonality. Such recognition of one another reveals the goal and effect of detention to be incomplete. Denial requires effort. In order to minimize the effort it must expend, the state ‘governs at distance’, via the contract. It also splits itself in two, deploying some immigration staff onsite, while keeping the actual decision makers (the caseworkers) elsewhere, sequestered from the potentially destabilizing effects of facing up to those whom they wish to remove. Such distancing, while bureaucratically effective, contributes to the uncertainty of daily life in detention, and is often the source of considerable criticism and unease. Denial and familiarity are embodied and localized activities, whose pains and contradictions inhere in concrete relationships. Such matters, which become visible through applied research, raise profound questions about the limits and pains of denial under conditions of mass mobility.

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