Introduction: Immigration detention around Europe

Europeans have long contented themselves with the notion that they epitomise civilised peoples. This is a view that continues to be found with remarkable frequency in the writings of European scholars across different disciplines, despite sustained and at times devastating critique from some of their colleagues (see further Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; Goody, 2006; Nader, 2013).

A similar phenomenon can be observed in the field of contemporary European penology. Here an increasing amount of scholarship expresses assurance, on occasion even pride, about the state of penal affairs around the continent today, at least in comparison with developments in the rest of the world. A good case in point is that argument which presents European jurisdictions as having largely managed to resist the international trend of adopting excessively punitive policies and practices from the United States. No doubt there is some basis for such assertions, yet there are also important reasons for taking a more cautious – indeed, critical – stance. Arguably one of the most serious is the key role played by penal and cognate institutions in managing the influx of migrants, regular as well as irregular, to European states over the last 30 years or so. The four articles that follow this brief introduction shed light specifically on the use of conventional and especially administrative detention of migrants in four relatively understudied European jurisdictions: France, Norway, Greece and Italy.

In his contribution on France, Nicolas Fischer reveals the various repressive facets of immigration control through detention, as well as showing how they challenge republican principles and legal structures that have long been established in the country. The case of Norway is similar: as Synnøve and Thomas Ugelvik demonstrate in their account of the Aliens Holding Centre at Trandum, coercion lies at the heart of immigration control in the country, thus marking yet another break with the all-too-common inclusion of Norwegian penality in what is referred to in pertinent literature as ‘Scandinavian exceptionalism’. My own analysis of immigration detention in Greece suggests that policies and practices of repression and coercion against migrants are ironically at their most acute in the country that purports to archetypically embody indiscriminate hospitality. Finally, as Asher Colombo explains in his contribution on the penal and administrative detention of foreigners in Italy, the approach practically adopted towards irregular migration by successive governments of different party-political orientation has been increasingly punitive, despite their divergence in terms of rhetoric.

Ultimately, if the long-standing neglect of immigration detention from the study of punitiveness is to be corrected by mainstream scholarship, European criminologists may be impelled to revise traditional arguments concerning the comparatively liberal standards of punishment in Europe.