In search of recognition: Gender and staff–detainee relations in a British immigration removal centre

IRC Morton Hall and immigration detention in the UK

Currently, 3000 men, women and children are detained under Immigration Act powers in the UK in secure custodial institutions, redolent of penal power. In addition, an unspecified number of foreigners are held under the same powers in police cells, secure hospitals, prisons and juvenile detention centres. ² Most IRCs are either built to the architectural specifications of high-security prisons or located in former prisons that have been, in the parlance of the prison service, ‘re-roled’.

Of the 10 IRCs dotted around the country, at the time of writing, four are currently contracted out to the prison service. IRC Morton Hall is one of them. Situated in a rural, agricultural area in eastern England, Morton Hall was, until early 2012, a low-security women’s prison containing a high concentration of foreign national prisoners. Previously, it had been an open men’s prison (i.e. a Category D, low-security establishment). The custodial staff in Morton Hall are, for the most part, white and English, drawn from the local community. Most are men, although, reflecting its recent past as a women’s prison, there is a sizable contingent of female officers as well.

At the time of the research Morton Hall had been an IRC for less than one year. According to population records given to us at the time, it held 382 detainees, hailing from 52 different countries. Those from the Indian subcontinent predominated, constituting almost half of the total detainee population (44 per cent). ³ There were also high numbers of Chinese (7 per cent, n = 28) and Jamaicans (5 per cent, n = 17), while Afghanis, Iranians, Zimbabweans, Vietnamese and Algerians all made up sizable and recognizable communities. In terms of religion, Muslims constituted the single biggest faith group, accounting for nearly half (49 per cent, n = 189) of the population. Sikhs and Hindus also comprised substantial religious groups.

Morton Hall stretches over a wide, green space with lawns on the inner compound and trees and fields outside the perimeter fence. There are facilities for football, basketball and tennis as well as a gym. There is a library and a multi-faith centre as well as a shop and a computer room in which the men can access the internet, although some websites, including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, are blocked. A limited amount of paid work is available. Detainees may seek employment in workshops that, at the time, produced ball bearings, but have in other periods housed industrial sewing machines. They may also apply to work in the kitchen, in the grounds or as barbers.

Daily life in Morton Hall is punctuated by roll call that occurs three times a day. During this period men must return to their housing units ⁴ to be counted. Some units keep cell doors unlocked, allowing detainees to circulate. All wings are closed during the evenings and for roll call. Detainees deemed to be higher risk are locked in their rooms for the night and during roll call. Their rooms have en-suite facilities. All housing units have association rooms for socializing and some are equipped with pool tables and TVs.

After a preliminary visit and meeting with the Senior Management team by Mary Bosworth, Gavin Slade conducted all the fieldwork in Morton Hall. ⁵ Visiting the IRC every day, Monday to Friday, over a period of one month, he clocked up 160 hours of participant observation. Over this time he conducted 32 in-depth interviews, most of which (24) were done individually. The remaining eight meetings occurred in small groups, the largest of which included four men. In total 44 detainees consented to be interviewed. Participant information sheets were presented in all cases and verbal or written consent obtained. Most (25 of 32) were recorded. The rest were unrecorded but extensive notes were taken and written up immediately afterwards. All but one multiple-respondent interview was recorded. This unrecorded interview involved only two respondents. Interviews lasted from 20 minutes to two hours.

As well as many informal conversations, Gavin recorded interviews with 12 staff. Eight of these respondents worked inside the inner compound, seven as duty officers on the units and one as a diversity officer in the diversity centre. The remaining four worked in the Welfare unit. One was at management level. Five were men. All had experiences working on units; all had worked at Morton Hall before it became an IRC. Gavin also spent time observing the day-to-day workings of the IRC in the grounds, around the staff offices in the residential units, in the library and diversity centre and in the ‘Hub’ unit that contained computing facilities and the shop. All participants have been attributed aliases.

Status confusions: Staff–detainee relations

The purpose and justification of IRCs is deeply contested. Whereas the state argues that such places are its right and obligation – a necessary part of border security, opponents emphasize their damaging effect, their arbitrary nature and their lack of efficiency in managing migration. Far removed from debates between policy makers and reformers, staff and detainees voice a range of concerns, revealing widespread lack of clarity about the ambit of such places.

Detainees, unsurprisingly, are often bitter about their detention. Though some were aware their immigration status or crime rendered them subject to detention, few anticipated being sent to such an institution. Many arrive directly from having signed on as usual as asylum seekers, while others might have been taken in a raid when the UK Border Agency was looking for someone else. From the staff’s perspective, few admit to aspiring to work in an IRC, and many are explicitly critical of them. Most fall into the job due to extraneous circumstances, which, in the case of Morton Hall, related to the transformation of the institution in which they were already working from a prison to an IRC.

There is considerable confusion at the policy level as well as on the ground about the distinction between IRCs and prisons. In those facilities run by the prison service, such confusion is magnified. At Morton Hall, a large number of the detainees are former prisoners who committed offences that carry automatic deportation orders. Detainees generally felt that such men adjusted better to life in the IRC. However, as Richard explains, many of them resented being seen as criminals now that their sentence was over.

Listen, I don’t disagree that I did a crime. I accept that. I got sentenced. I went to jail. I did not kick off, did not say any bad words. I ride my sentence … I was doing a course in jail. Everything I completed. I finished my jail sentence. I done all the programmes that they set up for me. Yeah? Boom. I come here now. This is another jail sentence. (Richard, Zimbabwe)

Denied legal recognition and thus the rights that such status would generate, detainees frequently attempt to assert a status as a kind of equivalent citizen (Bosworth, 2012). Accounts vary depending on their circumstances. For Ridoy, matters were clear – though originally from Bangladesh, he belonged in Britain:

I came as a child [when I was four] with my family, with my parents. I didn’t ask to come here … I’ve got family. I’ve got kids. I’ve got parents living here. I’ve got friends. I grew up here. I went to school. I went to college. (Ridoy, Bangladesh)

Men in Morton Hall attempt to overcome their status subordination in a number of ways. Many became enraged, yelling at those staff members who put them down and refusing to accept that their detention defined their identity, acting out instead a dominant form of masculinity.

Detainee: What are you people doing coming in my room to search it when I’m sleeping?

Male officer: We check everybody’s rooms – you’re not special.

Detainee: What do you mean I’m not special? Maybe I’m not special to you. But to some people I’m special – to my family I’m special. I’m special! Who do you think you’re talking to? My family pay their taxes – they pay you! What do you mean I’m not fucking special … who do you think you’re fucking talking to? (Research Notes, 7 May 2012)

Such attempts to resist subordination and misrecognition were only ever partially successful. For most detainees, the simple objects and architecture of the IRC made their lack of status clear. The fences, barred windows and uniformed staff drive home the point: those without immigration status are unwanted, prisoners despite serving no sentence. Though they tried to challenge their implicit criminalization, their resources were few: ‘I belong to very good family’, Kazi from Pakistan complained. ‘I never handcuffed before. But that’s, that the system here.’

The difficulty many detainees have in setting out a coherent and recognizable identity has implications for the institution as a whole. Interpersonal relations are hard to forge with strangers. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that staff and detainees rely on familiar tropes of race, class and gender, as well as discourses and expectations about citizenship and migration, to make sense of one another and themselves.

Banter, masculinity and the role of the female officer

Like prisons, immigration detention centres are highly gendered institutions, in which, with some exceptions, ⁶ women and men are held separately, in single-sex environments. Sometimes gender can be a resource for detainees, a means by which to assert an alternative identity to that of a ‘detainee’. In this vein, as in prison, a number of the men at Morton Hall spent considerable time working out in the gym, perfecting a muscular, male physique. Physical exercise could also help men adapt to their new surroundings and fill their empty days, Matthew explained:

[H]aving been detained before, I immediately set about finding out those things that I knew made me comfortable there, and finding them here – finding a gym so that I would know that I’d be able to train and have something to do when I woke up … (Matthew, Trinidad & Tobago)

Soon after it became an IRC, Morton Hall absorbed a number of male officers from nearby Ashwell men’s prison when it closed. These new staff members altered the gender balance of those working at Morton Hall and brought with them different cultural expectations about how to handle and interact with the confined population. Staff who had worked at Morton Hall when it held a high concentration of foreign national women, had some understanding of ethnic and religious differences. The staff from Ashwell had far less experience in this regard. Nonetheless, some of them felt they had an advantage over their more experienced female colleagues: their gender. ‘We can banter with the cons they can get on better with us than with female officers’, Martin confidently asserted:

Most of them have no respect for women, in the beginning it wasn’t working, you had them saying to you ‘I’m not taking orders from some white, honky wide-ass’ so it was right to bring in blokes and get us working on the units. (Research Notes, 2 May 2012)

Some detainees sought to counter the banter by asserting their own form of masculine dominance. This could be a dangerous strategy.

A Nigerian man [Charles] I had also talked to previously, with plenty of stored up attitude had come back to the unit after a day in court.

Charles: You need to unlock my door, innit? I’ve been at bail all day.

Male officer: You can’t get in your room?

C: It’s a cell not a room, it’s got bars on the windows, what room has that?

O: It’s a luxury pad is what it is … ‘innit’.

C: Nah man it’s a cell.

O: What’s your name again? Here’s your room label you have to reattach that by the door. We’ll be along in a minute.

C: I ain’t doing that [throws down the label]. You do it. That’s your job innit? That’s what you get paid for [chest out and winks at the officer contemptuously].

O: Right … you … [goes purple with anger] … you don’t get it, you need me for a lot longer than I’ll need you …

C: No, no, sir, you’re all right. I like you. I’ll do it. [picks up the label and walks off] (Research Notes, 1 May 2012)

Where male officers see sarcasm and wit as tools for establishing relations with detainees, however much they backfire in the multicultural context of the IRC, for women the process of earning recognition and respect from the detainees can be difficult. Some female staff also relied on banter to manage the men, but as Eveline explained, they often found it more difficult to govern men informally than they had women:

[C]ertainly we’re used to having banter with the women. And you can have banter with the men, but on top of that it’s [pauses] not all the men, I wouldn’t say it is all the men, you know, some of them are perfectly fine, but others are constantly making comments. Or trying to find out about your personal life, or who you are, are you married, have you got kids, where do you live? (Eveline, DCO, Diversity)

‘From utopia to what it is now’: Staff roles, nostalgia and gender

Staff expressed considerable ambivalence about their role as detention custody officers, ‘mourning’ ⁷ their lost status as prison officers. Like the detainees, they were often unable to understand the purpose of the institution and what they were doing there. As Sophie, who had initially chosen to go to Morton Hall to work with women, said:

In terms of being a prison any more, we’re not. But we’re more like a prison, security-wise, than we ever were. ⁸ And then obviously the fighting and the self-harm and things are probably worse than what we were when we were female. But yet the other side of it, we’re not. (Sophie, DCO, Welfare)

Others took up the same thread, speaking of ‘the golden years … [when] we had the girls here’ (Ron, DCM); a time when Morton Hall was ‘a utopia sort of thing’ (Sophie, DCO). Such wistfulness, longing for a community of women, reveals the importance of gender in recognition, suggesting that our interpretations of others and our capacity to understand them reflects, at least in part, fundamental ideas about women and men. Given the local of history of Morton Hall, such matters were particularly evident, because the detainees were frequently compared to the previous female occupants. For some staff, the male detainees were feminized and even more needy than women. ‘[I]t was strange for us when I saw them cry in front of us, I didn’t know what to do’, Arabella (DCM) admitted. ‘Because, you know, we weren’t trained for that, we trained more like, you know, “boys don’t cry”’ (Research Notes, 30 April 2012).

Yet while the men were needy ‘like women’ they did not have women’s needs. As a result, their demands felt less legitimate and were, in any case, Diane said, not the type of requests that staff could accommodate:

Women would come to you and say: ‘Miss, can you arrange an emergency phone call? I haven’t spoken to me kids for four weeks, and I’m really missing them’ and whatever. And you’d arrange that. You’d try to help any way you could. Men will come to you and say ‘Why isn’t there no effing Play Station in the association room? I know my rights. I know my human rights. Get me an effing Play Station.’ (Diane, DCO)

The specific trajectory of Morton Hall from a former woman’s prison to a men’s IRC shaped the everyday interactions of the staff and detainees, in highly gendered ways. In the transition to the IRC, the role of staff and their sense of self changed when they encountered an immigration system they found difficult to understand and a new population whom they struggled to recognize. For those officers who had worked in Morton Hall when it housed women, the loss of ties with the female prisoners was keenly felt. Gender, in this view, acted as both a source of recognition, and for some, a barrier to it.

Recognition, justice and sovereign power

The one extant study of staff in an IRC, by political scientist Alexandra Hall (2010, 2012), considers these places through the combined lens of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, as, on the one hand, sites of sovereign power and on the other, of exception. Hall found staff to be fearful of the detainees and contemptuous of their obtruding claims. Detainees appeared to be frustrated and angry. Only very occasionally, were the officers able ‘to recognize the detainees – far from being wholly other, dangerous, threatening – as just like them (and vice versa)’ (Hall, 2010: 894, emphasis in original).

Rather than viewing IRCs as places of exception we suggest they may be better understood as representative of the increasing insecurity inherent in an era of mass mobility. As others have observed, the Agamben (1998, 2005) framework obscures lived complexities and the connections between these sites and society more broadly (Butler, 2004; Rygiel, 2011). In contrast, the concept of recognition draws out these parallels through close attention to the varied lived insecurities and status deprivations of detention as these relate to what both detainees and staff believe they can legitimately claim. Detainee and staff accounts in this article demonstrate how life in IRCs is forged through everyday interactions, in which people recognize, misrecognize, deny and accept one another as fellow human beings with legitimate claims to social status. The legitimacy of such claims rests upon appeals to culturally and socially defined standards generated within the society in which the IRC is embedded. IRCs, this approach reveals, are tied to existing modes of cultural recognition and familiar structures of inequality. As such, analysis of these institutions can inform and draw upon wider political debates about belonging, justice and power in a global world.

Separated from family and friends, detainees must either find solace and self-determination within themselves or through their interactions with staff and other detainees. Yet, in the confused environment of the IRC, misrecognition of some detainees by staff, as representatives of the state, can subtly highlight the status insecurity of the detainees at a higher level in their relationship to the state, their claims to citizenship and their cultural belonging to the UK. Concentrating on recognition and misrecognition in such an environment reveals a close relationship between power and affect.

In IRCs such matters are framed by the institutional lack of clarity over the purpose of detention. Sometimes, staff and detainees found that their shared confusion was a source of recognition in its own right, as Diane commented sympathetically: ‘[T]he country is in a complete and utter mess, right … And we’re keeping them here, the massive cost … They’re sick of being stuck in this place. And I really do sympathize with them’ (Diane, DCO). All too often, however, staff and detainees retreat into separate camps, unable to find points of commonality. As Edward, a detainee originally from Kenya, put it:

[T]here is a rift, there is a big rift at the moment. There is a rift between, between the detainees and the officers. Or anybody who wears a key … And a lot of it is because … detainees and officers are not linking up. (Edward, Kenya)

Conclusion

As institutions that manifest the state’s unsure and anxious attempt to reassert sovereign control over territory and people, IRCs present challenges and insights into studying and understanding penal power in an era of mass mobility. Unlike prisons, which they so closely resemble, removal centres do not produce recognizable subjects. Whereas the goal and originating purpose of prison is to ‘make sense of’ (punish, reform, deter) offenders, IRCs seem designed to have the opposite effect, rendering those within unfamiliar. Detainees, their confinement attests, are not like ‘us’. They are foreign, bound for and belonging elsewhere. Their foreignness cannot be changed, no matter how long they have lived in Britain. They are always, already, different and unknowable, potentially a threat.

At the same time, however, removal centres are neither ‘states of exception’, nor are detainees abject and entirely powerless. Notwithstanding their undeniably vulnerable status, many resist their detention and seek legal remedy. Some have considerable ties to the UK, which, under the Human Rights Act may suffice as grounds to remain. Others fail to produce travel documents, file judicial reviews or refuse to get on the plane. Such strategies are time limited in effect and individually extremely distressing and demeaning. However, they have some success, as national statistics reveal that one-third of the detained population is bailed or temporarily admitted each year to the British community. Detention may be easy to implement, deportations and removals, however, are difficult to enforce (Gibney, 2008).

In creating institutions where identity justifies and defines custody, the state has set itself an impossible task. Under conditions of globalization and mass migration, it is increasingly difficult to identify who among us ‘belongs’ or is entitled to stay (see Aas and Bosworth, 2013). Considerable work in this regard has been created by housing detainees in institutions that look like prisons, since the stigma of such places attaches to their residents, reinforcing ideas of their dangerousness and threat. However, the appeal to the prison itself creates other problems as staff and detainees continually compare the two institutions and find IRCs lacking.

It would be naïve to suggest that detainees are able to succeed in their bids for recognition. Immigration laws continue to tighten. What these places reveal, however, is the link between penal power and identity. As this article has suggested, familiar beliefs about gender percolate through IRCs, intersecting with other tropes about race, class and citizenship. In myriad everyday ways, staff and detainees grapple with such matters, as they sometimes recognize and other times deny one another. The institutional uncertainty of IRCs is extreme, and may, in time, reduce. However, as our social world is shaped increasingly by interactions with those who are both like and not like us, it is time that criminologists put the relationship between power and identity at the heart of their analysis.