Book review: Mary Bosworth,Inside Immigration Detention,Emma Kaufman,Punish and Expel: Border Control,Nationalism,and the New Purpose of the Prison and Ian O’Donnell,Prisoners,Solitude and Time

Inside Immigration Detention

Bosworth’s Inside Immigration Detention is the first empirical study of the inner-life of Immigration Removal Centres in the United Kingdom. She presents a careful and detailed exposition of six centres and what life inside them is like for both detainees and for staff. Her research was carried out between 2009 and 2012 and she worked with a team of researchers to carry out interviews, gather survey data, conduct observations and amass field notes using a broadly ethnographic approach.

The book begins by mapping the story of immigration detention centres in the UK, most notably by outlining the scale and growth of these centres. Bosworth goes on to trace the political context in which immigration detention centres emerged and how that context has steadily developed as the use of immigration detention has expanded. She presents a timely account of detention centres as sites of confinement and exclusion in a globalized world.

Inside Immigration Detention makes a substantial contribution to the growing body of criminological analyses of detention policy and practice. It provides a richly detailed and, at times, heart-wrenching examination of detention at an institutional level. In doing so, Bosworth opens up the immigration centre for wider scrutiny, demonstrating the blurriness of ill-thought-out policy-making in its all too real practical manifestation. Bosworth brings her own insights to bear on the empirical data, drawing connections to existing theoretical works on state power and global politics. Juxtaposed against these broader theoretical discussions is the detail of institutional life through which Bosworth considers the ‘crisis of identity’ experienced by detainees. Through vivid ethnographic writing she conveys the despair, sense of confusion, loss and uncertainty experienced by those held in detention. She argues, however, that the strength of the personal identities of the detainees endured, illustrating the significance of the self over the weight of the regime imposed upon those caught up in detention. Bosworth engages in a significant and sustained critique of immigration detention, inspired by the effects of detention on the capacities of both detainees and staff to navigate the terrain of the estranged whilst clinging to their common humanity. Thus convincing and compelling arguments are put forward about the state of confusion within and surrounding immigration detention centres and the lack of clear justification regarding their use. Importantly, Bosworth argues that such places need not be constituted in the way they are. As with many manifestations of social and criminal justice policy – if constructed differently – practices of immigration management could look quite different.

Threaded throughout the book Bosworth endeavours to capture the challenges – personal, ethical, moral – of conducting research inside detention centres. She evidently wrestles with the compromises and approaches she needed to take in order to gain access, following an ‘appreciative’ route aimed at satisfying the gatekeepers. It might be argued – and has been by many before Bosworth – that the compromises one needs to make in order to secure access to hidden places are worth it because they ensure that an independent, outside view is made possible. Moreover, it can be suggested that the privileged access that independent academic researchers can sometimes secure in order to carry out ‘objective’ research will ultimately feed in to reforms, improved practices and changed conditions. However, despite the strength, rigour and carefulness of this research (and much that has gone on in prisons before), I remain unconvinced that academic research in closed institutions will ever result in fundamental or sustained change. And so one wonders if the compromises that must be made to satisfy gatekeepers are ever really worth it. Entering detention centres via other routes, such as through aid or activist organizations, may serve some of the same purposes and may at least make some modest difference to individuals on a day-to-day basis. However, this remains an enduring dilemma and tension within criminological research, and Bosworth is not the first to wrestle with it.

Punish and Expel: Border Control, Nationalism and the New Purpose of the Prison

Kaufman’s Punish and Expel focuses on a similar population to that considered by Bosworth in the sense that it looks at the experiences of foreign nationals. However, Kaufman’s work is the first detailed examination of imprisoned foreign nationals in the United Kingdom. Drawing on rich empirical data, presented in carefully constructed ethnographic prose, the book casts a spotlight onto the individual stories and experiences of foreign national prisoners in a way that allows for a deeper understanding of their particular pains of imprisonment. At the same time, however, the book also attempts to consider broader themes of nationalism and citizenship, and it posits the argument that prisons are now serving a new purpose as sites of border control.

Kaufman’s work makes a number of important contributions. It connects prisons to the history of British colonialism which, indeed, is a substantial area of study in and of itself. But it also outlines the increasing force of global relations and the role that is played by the politics of ‘race’ within these relations. She argues that previous studies of borders and migration control in the fields of sociology and criminology have remained too closely focused on the nation-state and the way international and globalizing influences have begun to infiltrate it. Likewise, she argues that studies of prisons and punishment have a number of blind spots with respect to ‘transnational theories of punishment’ (p. 52). Kaufman’s work attempts, in part, to augment this literature by examining ‘what happens to the criminal justice system, and to punishment, when two large and historically situated agencies respond to a perceived crisis’ (p. 9).

Kaufman draws out important bureaucratic and operational changes that have taken place in prisons with respect to their role and purpose as measured by the experiences of foreign national prisoners. Taking the experience of prisoners deemed to be foreign nationals (sometimes this is not how they would define themselves) as her starting point, Kaufman is able to view prisons and punishment through a different lens and allows her readers to see the landscape from this vantage point too. Written in poignant ethnographic detail and told through the stories of individuals, Kaufman captures aspects of the subjective experience of non-citizens caught up in the criminal justice system that have not been systematically captured in the prisons or in the migration literature. For me, this is the main strength of the book – and she, rightly, privileges this aspect of her work over the other, more theoretical aims of the piece. On the latter, it would have been more satisfying to have seen sustained engagement with recent debates emerging from work on intersectionality. Although this is present in the book, a fuller discussion of the role of social class (in particular) as it intersects with ‘race’ and ‘gender’ would have been most welcome. In addition, I was a little disappointed by the omission of a deep engagement with and, ideally, an extension of the work of Alessandro De Giorgi and his ideas about the hyper-criminalization of migrants and the paradigm of global less eligibility. However, this is a gentle criticism of the work, stemming merely from my own desire to know how the author would engage with De Giorgi’s ideas in light of her findings and analyses.

Prisoners, Solitude and Time

O’Donnell’s Prisoners, Solitude and Time is, in many ways, a book of a different meter altogether. It is based on a wealth of diverse sources that includes empirical research, but draws much more on historical documents, philosophical teachings, considered reflection, memoir and literature. Prisoners, Solitude and Time considers the similarities and differences between experiences of solitude – for example, in monastic or other voluntary conditions – and experiences of enforced or administrative segregation for prisoners. O’Donnell states at numerous points throughout the book that the experience of segregation in prisons exacts a particular kind of pain. But a significant aim of this work is to attempt to disentangle the potentially restorative elements of solitary experiences from their more damaging effects.

In essence O’Donnell’s work in Prisons, Solitude and Time is a study in two halves. The first half of the book – from Chapters 1–6 – focuses on an examination of solitude and of solitary confinement. The ethics of the practice of solitary confinement have long vexed prison administrators, reformers, and scholars. Grounded in religious practices and traditions, the separation of prisoners and the use of a ‘silent system’ was historically utilized as a means of encouraging quiet contemplation to rehabilitative effect. The use of such measures, however, remains a feature of most prison systems around the world – sometimes just for shorter periods of time, but also on a large scale in the case of supermax prisons in the United States. O’Donnell’s purpose in his examinations of solitary confinement is to disentangle the potential damage from the potential restoration that periods spent in solitude and isolation can offer. He acknowledges that enforced confinement adds additional weight to the burdens of solitude, but he somehow falls short, in my view, of engaging fully with the extreme painfulness that is the enforced loss of one’s liberty and the way this painfulness is compounded when solitary conditions are also imposed. That is, O’Donnell seems to begin from a premise that there are virtues of solitude regardless of the context, which is a difficult argument to make and one which I was not convinced by.

In the latter part of Prisoners, Solitude and Time – from Chapter 8 onwards – O’Donnell moves on to a focused consideration of the passage of time as experienced by prisoners. It is here that, in my view, the book makes a considerable contribution to prison and detention scholarship. Drawing on a range of personal accounts and detailed analyses, O’Donnell begins to go some way towards filling the gap in our understanding of how time is experienced and negotiated by those serving it. Indeed, the idea that prisoners ‘serve’ time – in a subservient sense, where time exerts an untold power over them in myriad and insidious ways throughout the prison sentence and beyond – is brought to life in new and enthralling ways in O’Donnell’s analyses. O’Donnell introduces the notion of the ‘pain quotient’, which is an idea worthy of much more detailed consideration. O’Donnell proposes it as ‘a device for thinking about the interplay between time and imprisonment in general terms’ (p. 201) and suggests the two key variables are time to be served and life to be lived (life expectance and chronological age). It seems that with the notion of a pain quotient O’Donnell is looking for on objective measure of the painfulness of time. However, in my view, this idea could be more powerfully utilized if it could also take account of more subjective dimensions of experiences of imprisonment and detention. It is the subjective experience of confinement that is often least understood by policy and law-makers and, importantly, by society in general. Whilst the conceptual areas O’Donnell explores, on isolation, solitude and time, are largely considered within the context of solitary confinement, they are – as O’Donnell acknowledges – features of experiences of confinement more generally too and, when read together with the empirical work of Bosworth and Kaufman, add depth and texture to their analyses of the universally human responses to experiences of exclusion and detention.

Continuities and common features in experiences of confinement

Bosworth’s study considered a population that differed from that examined by either O’Donnell (for the most part) or Kaufman. Her work focused on people held in detention purely on the basis of their citizenship (or lack thereof). So their confinement was enforced – like some of the subjects considered by O’Donnell – but they had not contravened the law in the same way as those examined by Kaufman. This quality – the comparative innocence (in a traditional legal sense) of Bosworth’s subjects – will be a ‘game changer’ for many who will read these books as it adds an unequivocal sense of injustice at the unfairness of their treatment. The justification of the use of detention as a solution to immigration problems is not clear-cut. Those confined in immigration detention centres often do not adhere to people’s conceptions of what it means to be ‘criminal’. It was evident in some of the reflections of immigration detention centre staff that they felt uncomfortable operationalizing the policy of immigration detention. That is, many had difficulty viewing their charges as ‘the other’ or as deserving of confinement. These are not problems that tend to bedevil prison staff.

Immigration detention centres are not, theoretically, intended to fulfil the same purposes as prisons, that is: to rehabilitate, incapacitate, deter or deliver justice. And yet, as Bosworth’s research illuminates, they are remarkably like prisons and so their purposes and justifications need to be urgently reconsidered. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that prisons, in their actual use and practice, do not succeed in fulfilling any of these purposes either – with the notable exception (in both the case of the prison and of the detention centre) of incapacitation. The way incapacitation is achieved in practice in custodial settings is through social exclusion, isolation, expulsion. It would seem, then, that this is the tried and tested means by which our society (and those that have been colonized by Britain) has long responded to those who we wish to cast out (for one reason or another). Reading Kaufman’s and Bosworth’s work together shows us that, like prisons, immigration removal centres function – fundamentally – to control, isolate and hold secure populations that have been deemed to be threatening, underserving, and unwanted. Whilst Bosworth’s and Kaufman’s analyses tell us much about how migrants and those deemed to be foreign nationals are treated, viewed and constructed in policy terms, they also implicitly tell us how, through processes of stigmatization and criminalization, we discard and cast out our own citizenry (those imprisoned for breaking the law). The grounds on which societies choose who to exclude have been expanding and becoming more entrenched for some time in British policy-making. The designation of certain groups as ‘enemies from outside’ (unwanted immigrants) or ‘enemies within’ (the poor, the homeless, the less eligible, the undeserving) can be seen as a growing intolerance for anyone outside of a very narrow white, middle-class, ‘mainstream’ profile.

These three books, helpfully, demonstrate for us one means by which such trends of exclusion and expulsion might be challenged. Through their deep and considered engagement with the subjective experiences of the people society is casting out, they stand as testament to the importance of understanding lived experience. All of these books remind us that by treating people as less than human, we undermine our collective humanity. Denying the harm that is caused by exclusionary and isolating practices de-socializes the individuals who are cast out and erodes the capacity for societies to overcome complex and challenging social, political and economic conditions. O’Donnell suggests that ‘it is important to locate harms precisely if they are to be challenged effectively’ (p. 119) and, I would argue that in order to do so, much more effort needs to be made to capture, communicate and, above all, understand the subjective experiences of those ostracized and cast out – in prisons, in immigration detention, in marginalized communities around the country. It is here that perhaps O’Donnell’s ‘pain quotient’ needs to be applied and broadened in order to understand – fundamentally, universally – the harm caused by processes of criminalization, social exclusion and ‘othering’. It is perhaps only through widespread recognition of our shared humanity with those suffering in prison, in detention, in solitude that we may be able to put an end to the failed and damaging practices of imprisonment and detention. By virtue of their rich ethnographic and vivid exposition of experience inside confinement, all three of these books go some way in contributing to what it means to be excluded, isolated and cast out.