Techniques of legitimation: The narrative construction of legitimacy among immigration detention officers

Immigration detention and the need for legitimation

The Police Aliens Holding Centre at Trandum is Norway’s only immigration detention centre. It is conveniently located about 40 minutes’ drive north of Oslo and right next door to Norway’s main international airport. Since its opening, Trandum has been a controversial institution in the eyes of the Norwegian public. It lacks the strong legitimacy foundation that the Norwegian prison system rests on. While Norwegian prison staff in general are proud of their job and happy to talk about it, several officers at Trandum told me that they avoid telling strangers they meet at a party where they work. Officers at Trandum are also frequently proud of the work they do, but they are often self-conscious about working in an institution with a legitimacy deficit. For detention centre officers, successfully dealing with the institutional legitimacy deficit is an important part of the job.

This paper examines the backstage narrative legitimation work a specific type of state employee engages in as part of their everyday interaction in the workplace. I will describe how Trandum staff work to bridge the gap between an experienced legitimacy deficit resulting from external (general public) as well as internal (detainees) criticism, and a desired positive professional self-image. I will argue that storytelling plays a central role in this legitimation work. If it is true that storytelling is an essential part of the human experience in general (Frank, 2010; McAdams, 1993; Presser and Sandberg, 2015), stories should also be seen as a central part of the smooth running of any government agency. I will show how immigration detention officers make sense of their role and construct their activities as justified, rational, and legitimate (Bosworth, 2013). The paper is thus a contribution to the growing criminology of mobility (Pickering et al., 2015). A secondary goal is to open up the narrative criminology field to include other storytellers and other kinds of stories than the ‘usual suspects’. Another is to bring the literature on informal backstage self-legitimacy work into the narrative criminology proper. I am going to describe how staff agents engage in the telling and sharing of stories in order to create and strengthen a staff culture of self-validation. It is therefore also, simultaneously, a contribution to narrative and cultural criminology (see inter alia Aspden and Hayward, 2015; Maruna, 2015; Presser and Sandberg, 2015).

Narrative criminology and state actors

Sutherland famously defined criminology as ‘the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon. It includes within its scope the processes of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting toward the breaking of laws’ (Sutherland, 1960 [1924]: 3). The research explicitly positioned as part of the burgeoning criminological subfield known as narrative criminology has, thus far, almost exclusively been focused on the breaking of laws. A number of analyses of the relationship between storytelling and crime have been published in recent years (Brookman et al., 2011; Christian and Kennedy, 2011; Fleetwood, 2015; McKendy, 2006; Presser, 2004, 2009; Sandberg et al., 2015; Ugelvik, 2012, 2015). Recently, Presser (2013) has widened the scope of narrative criminology to include other kinds of ‘harm’ than the ones we traditionally label as ‘crime’. Nevertheless, explaining the connection between offences and the storytelling practices of offenders has to a large extent been seen as the sine qua non of narrative criminology. Exceptions are Joosse, Bucerius, and Thompson (2015), who explore why young Somali-Canadian youths do not join international terrorist networks, and scholars like Maruna (2001) and Colvin (2015), who examine the role of narratives in desistance processes. I believe there is a potential to widen the scope of narrative criminology further. In this paper, I want to contribute to opening up the field of inquiry to include other groups and other kinds of narratives than offenders’ stories about their offences. In short, I believe narrative criminology should include all three parts of Sutherland’s definition.

According to Weber (1946), active legitimation work is present wherever a relationship of domination and subordination exists. Indeed, according to Smith:

Just as worship is one of the characterising activities of religion, or singing one of the characterising features of choral music, the self-legitimation of rulers is part of the activity of ruling, and as such contributes to both constituting it and defining it. (Smith, 2009: 30)

What characterizes government, in other words, is not the possession of legitimacy but the ongoing activity of legitimation. Legitimacy does not appear magically and mysteriously out of thin air; it is the result of active work by government agents. A number of possible resources are available for these agents when they put forward legitimacy claims. Divine right, social contracts, and future social harmony have all been tropes or discourses that states historically have deployed to fortify their legitimacy structures. Today, religious justifications that were once important tools of state crafting have lost much of their traditional appeal, at least in Western societies. They have been replaced by claims to democratic, bureaucratic, and procedural legitimacy built on a well-functioning system of checks and balances. Procedural legitimacy and a sound legal basis are important, but looking at oneself in the proverbial mirror may still be difficult for the people who have to use legitimate force as part of their professional lives. The main point in this paper is that for these professional groups, procedural legitimacy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a positive self-image. More informal forms of self-legitimation work are also necessary to still the moral ambiguity that accompanies the use of coercive force against one’s fellow human beings (Waddington, 1999). More precisely, I will discuss the backstage storytelling activities that officers at Norway’s single high-security police immigration detention centre regularly engage in. I will describe some of the techniques employed at the local level to solve the problems associated with an occupational role that regularly involves the breaking of important social norms.

This sort of argument is not, of course, entirely novel. Although narrative criminology is relatively new as a specific criminological sub-field, it stands on the shoulders of a number of more or less well-known and established older research traditions (Maruna, 2015; Presser and Sandberg, 2015). Within the broad tradition of police sociology, for instance, studies of police storytelling practices go back at least the 1980s and 1990s (van Hulst, 2013; Manning, 1980; Shearing and Ericson, 1991; Waddington, 1999). These studies have not, however, in general been seen as examples of narrative criminology, at least not until van Hulst (2014) recently connected the police storytelling research tradition explicitly to the wider narrative criminology project. Inspired by van Hulst, I will partly base my argument on the police canteen culture literature (which could, in fact, be described as ‘proto-narrative criminology’), as well as on legitimacy theory. I will also take my cue from neutralization theory. Sykes and Matza (1957) famously introduced five techniques of neutralization used by (would-be) offenders to counter and negate the social pressures towards conform behaviour. These are: (1) denial of responsibility (‘it wasn’t me’); (2) denial of injury (‘it didn’t really hurt anyone’); (3) denial of the victim (‘s/he had it coming’); (4) condemnation of condemners (‘who are you to judge?’); and (5) appeal to higher authorities (‘yes, it’s illegal, but God is above the law’). If we follow Maruna and Copes’s (2005) critical assessment of neutralization theory and understand the neutralizations employed by offenders as examples of human identity construction and sense making in general, there can be no surprise that state agents employ similar techniques. Some of the stories detention centre officers tell each other have much in common with the techniques described by Sykes and Matza. Officers tell stories about dangerous and violent detainees in a way that ascribes responsibility and denies victim status. But the self-legitimation work Trandum officers do also includes stories that seem far removed from Sykes and Matza’s neutralizations, including stories about Trandum as a decent and (relatively) humane institution where people do a difficult job to the best of their abilities, acknowledging the common humanity they share with the detainees in the process. I will show that the legitimacy structure officers jointly talk into being through their shared stories is as complex and multi-faceted as narrative identity is in general (Frank, 2010; McAdams, 1993).

Trandum’s legitimacy deficit

Although Norway has decided to stay outside the European Union, the country is part of the EEA and Schengen areas. According to publicly available official statistics from the Directorate of Immigration (UDI, 2015), 35,400 third country nationals were granted residence permits in 2015. Around a third of these permits were granted on family reunification grounds, about a quarter were granted asylum, and slightly less than a quarter were given work permits. The rest of the permits were mainly student visas. In addition to this, 41,300 EEA citizens registered as residents in Norway.

The National Police Immigration Service (Politiets utlendingsenhet, PU) is responsible for welcoming potential immigrants to the country. PU carries out the initial interviews in the process of determining the status of the hopeful immigrant and the nature of his or her claim to stay in the country. Further information gathering procedures are carried out by the Directorate of Immigration, which is also responsible for processing the application. Any applicant who gets a final negative decision is obliged to leave the country by the deadline set in the individual case. If they refuse to leave, the police may detain them and escort them out of the country.

The Aliens Holding Centre at Trandum was opened for this purpose in 2004, taking over disused cold war era army barracks in a field next to the airport. Much has changed since then, however; today, all detainees have moved into new buildings built to the Norwegian prison standard. It currently has a capacity to hold 137 detainees, but the capacity will increase in the near future, as new wings will open in 2016.

On 15 March 2015, there was a major incident at Trandum. Some 50 detainees were involved in what the newspapers called a riot. It started when detainees refused to return to their cells after the end of their scheduled time in the exercise yard. The situation soon escalated from passive opposition to active destruction and vandalism. Several cells and the common areas on two wings sustained serious damage. Extensive fire department and police department resources were deployed to Trandum, journalists from all major local and national media following on their heels. The police managed to regain control of the situation in a few hours. Faced with a mounting police presence, detainees returned to their cells, or in a handful of cases were moved to the security wing, without serious injuries occurring.

Unsurprisingly, Trandum received extensive media attention in the days following the so-called riot. The incident was described as a well-organized protest planned by a group of ‘asylum prisoners’ in order to direct attention to the poor conditions at Trandum in general and, in particular, to the fact that these conditions had led to two unsuccessful suicide attempts the previous month. According to Zulifqar Munir, an attorney with several clients detained at Trandum at the time, detainees felt they were being treated like ‘second-rate human beings’ (Dagsavisen, 2015. Another attorney, who wished to stay anonymous to avoid creating problems for his clients, said that the frustration stemmed from being detained for 18 months or longer in what is essentially designed to be a short-term institution. Rune Berglund Steen, the head of Antirasistisk Senter, an NGO pressure group, wrote an op-ed piece two days after the incident. He claimed that Trandum had reached boiling point; a predictable result when you systematically imprison desperate people and threaten to force them to return to the place from which they are fleeing (Klassekampen, 2015).

The following week, Maria Wasvik (2015), also at Antirasistisk Senter, published a summary of the criticism directed at Trandum since its opening. She described a number of cases where the detention centre has received critical media attention, like the 2007 suicide in the security wing toilet, and the 2011 so-called ‘Amelie case’ where a young woman was detained and deported to Russia in the middle of what can only be described as a media storm (Ugelvik, 2013). According to Wasvik, the major problem at Trandum is that the institution has been made to look progressively more and more like a prison. The level of control has increased to mimic that of a high-security prison, even though detainees ‘have done nothing punishable’. For Wasvik, Trandum is essentially a prison for people who do not belong in prison.

It is true that even though Trandum is not legally a prison, it does look like one in many ways. Detainees are strip-searched and required to squat naked on a mirror on the floor upon entering the institution and following every visit. Officers at Trandum can arm themselves with truncheons when needed, and they wear uniforms resembling prison officers’ garb. The high fences surrounding the institutions are adorned with a number of CCTV cameras and topped with razor wire. The main difference between Trandum and a regular Norwegian prison is the legal status of the people incarcerated there. Detainees at Trandum, unlike prisoners, have committed no crime in the classical sense; they have violated the Immigration Act, not the Penal Code, and are thus held at Trandum not as a punishment, but as a precautionary and practical administrative measure. Unlike the goal of a Norwegian prison, then, the point of Trandum is not to rehabilitate people and bring them back into society, but to make deportation as efficient as possible. A result is that staff at immigration detention centres lack several of the core legitimacy resources that are available to prison officers (Bosworth, 2012, 2013, 2014). This adds to the challenges of working in an institution characterized by a fundamental lack of trust that is created and reinforced by the rules and regulations, as well as the physical environment, of the institution.

Research methods

A ‘story’ may be defined as a recounting of a series of discrete events in a certain order that makes it more or less explicit that these events are in some way connected and that they bear on each other. We expect stories to have certain features in common (McAdams, 1993). They have a beginning, a middle, and an end; they are set in a time/space context and they have at least one actor. Even if not all stories have proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and settings might not be spelled out, most people would recognize a story through these elements. In practice, things may be a bit more complicated however. A series of overlapping and intersecting stories might form a loosely knit narrative whole in a way that may make it difficult to say where one story begins and another ends (Frank, 2010). One might also want to include the setting of the scene that takes part ahead of the actual storytelling event as part of the story. I would argue that the staging of a story is vital for an understanding of the story as a performative device; to understand what stories are used for as part of social interaction. Finally, stories not only talk about the events that are being recounted; they also tell tales about each other, and about the narrative field they are part of in general. Following Bakhtin (1982), one might say they are in dialogue with each other; they may more or less explicitly refer back and forth between each other intertextually. In this paper, I have sometimes chosen to include the staging of stories in order to communicate excess information about the social context and the field site in general, and to preserve some of the complex intertextual meaning of the original storytelling situation.

Empirically, the paper is based on 40 days of ethnographic fieldwork at Trandum in 2013. I was given keys and could come and go as I pleased and talk with anyone I wanted to – detainees as well as staff – without prior approval. I have included in the study both stories told in more ‘private’ (one-to-one conversations between one or a few officers and the researcher) and more ‘public’ settings (stories told to a larger group of fellow officers and the researcher). All stories have in common, however, that they were part of the ‘secret’ backstage life of an institution where outsiders normally do not have access. They were all told in informal backstage settings like around a lunchtime table or over a cup of coffee in one of the officer break areas. They were all intended for internal consumption and are not part of or adapted to fit the formal public self-presentation of the institution. I was, of course, open about my research interests and the purpose of my visit; as a lone civilian with keys in an institution filled with detainees and uniformed personnel, it is difficult to blend in perfectly. Initially, some officers seemed understandably uneasy around me, unsure of my role and the potential results of my research. I was able to spend enough time in the institution, however, to be able to be included in the backstage exchange of stories that has made this paper possible.

I did not conduct formal interviews and did not tape any conversations. Instead, extensive observation notes were written on the same or following day, based on memory and selected quotes and key words quickly noted in a notebook while still in the field. I have made an effort to recall and reflect meaning, language tone, and style, in addition to the ‘content’ of the stories in a narrow sense. I have not used quotation markers, however, to remind readers that field notes cannot be read as a perfect verbatim rendition of the stories I was told.

The data was coded using the HyperRESEARCH qualitative analysis software. The main aim of the overall research project was to understand the production of order/security, legitimacy, and welfare, three fundamental ‘products’ that all prisons and prison-like institutions (such as high-security immigration detention centres) are supposed to deliver, from the point of view of the everyday life in the institution. Analytically, I used these three abstract phenomena as a theoretical foundation. I then went back and forth between the data and the relevant available literature on order/security, legitimacy, and welfare in custodial institutions. For the purpose of this paper specifically, I went back to the data and looked for storytelling situations within all three major analytical categories. These stories were then analysed both as stories that are (at least in part) working back on and repositioning the teller (their performative capacity), and as responses to (often implicit) attacks directed at the legitimacy of the institution. The two analytical questions I asked of the stories and the storytelling situations were ‘how is the storyteller positioning her- or himself through the telling of this story’ and ‘to what sort of implicit legitimacy challenge would this story work as a response?’

The narrative legitimation work of government actors

Legitimacy, according to Sparks (1994), refers to the claims made by any dominant group within a distribution of power to justified authority. In his seminal work, Beetham (2013 [1991]) argues that legitimacy should be seen as a complex phenomenon consisting of different elements, such as legal validity (conformity to rules), justifiability in terms of shared beliefs, and legitimation through explicit consent. Beetham’s work complicates things for scholars who have, following Weber, seen legitimacy simply as the same as belief in legitimacy. This view of legitimacy as a composite with different aspects makes it possible for a given political system (or a given specific institution like Trandum) to be simultaneously legally and procedurally legitimate yet also, in the eyes of a given observer, highly unjust. From this perspective legitimacy is not an absolute, not a simple question of either/or, but something that is perhaps better thought of as a multidimensional and complex phenomenon.

Most empirical studies of legitimacy have focused on the relationship between rulers and the ruled; what Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) call ‘audience legitimation’. An exception is Barker’s (2001) study of self-legitimation as a fundamental and characterizing feature of government. This inward-turning aspect of legitimation has until recently attracted relatively little attention. In the world of everyday government however, the language, rituals, and narratives of self-legitimation are much more significant than the legitimation efforts directed at the public, according to Barker:

[r]egimes can survive an absence, failure or collapse of legitimation amongst their subjects. They cannot survive a collapse of legitimation within the personnel of government. When subjects lose faith in rulers, government becomes difficult. When rulers lose confidence in themselves, it becomes impossible. (Barker, 2001: 68)

Staff at Trandum regularly brought up the legitimacy deficit of the institution in conversation. They told several stories about being at the receiving end of uncomfortable stares and negative comments while transporting deportees through Gardermoen Airport:

We try to be a bit discreet, you know, we hide our badges under our shirts, that sort of thing. But if you pay attention, it’s pretty clear what we’re doing. Just imagine, when we’re standing there at the gate with a mother and two small kids, all three of them crying, it isn’t a pretty picture, we understand that. So we get our share of nasty glares. One time, this concerned woman came over and wanted to give some money to the family we were deporting, but we’re supposed to confiscate their money to pay for the deportation, so that got a bit awkward. I’ve never experienced anyone actually trying to stop us, though.

As Tankebe and Liebling (2013) state in the introduction to their book about Legitimacy and Criminal Justice, the recent interest in legitimacy within criminology has been primarily focused on procedural justice. Without denying that procedural justice is an important part of the whole, I will concentrate in this paper on the more informal behind-the-scenes or backstage legitimation work that goes on wherever immigration detention officers meet over a meal, a cup of coffee, or a cigarette. The core of my argument is that self-legitimation in part is produced through the telling and sharing of stories. I will use the rest of the paper to describe four techniques of legitimation regularly used by officers at Trandum. These are: (1) stories that attribute responsibility to individual detainees (‘it’s his own fault, he brought this on himself’); (2) cautionary tales about disturbed, risky, or dangerous detainees (‘these are dangerous people, we must protect ourselves and the other detainees’); (3) stories about the proficiency/professionalism of staff (‘we are trained to do this, we know what we’re doing’); and finally (4) stories about Trandum as a humane and decent institution (‘this is a decent place, we treat people properly, there’s nothing really to complain about’). Of course, officers talk about many other different things over lunch, but these four types of stories are regularly told. There are several examples of all four in my fieldwork data.

Narrative legitimacy work

Narrative criminology has up to this point spent a lot of effort on the stories offenders tell as part of or as justification for offending. This paper has attempted to widen the scope of narrative criminology to include the backstage stories told by government officials, as part of the everyday, mundane work they do. The focus has been on storytelling as legitimation work, and thus as an integral part of the activity of governing. As Claude nicely puts it, ‘emperors may be nude, but they do not like to be so, to think of themselves so, or to be so regarded’ (quoted in Barker, 2001: 16–17). The use of coercive force on part of the state needs to be continuously re-legitimated, or else it risks leaving the state representatives looking and feeling nude. The narrative self-legitimation work that detention centre staff members engage in to justify and legitimize their job to themselves and their peers may thus even be said to be completely necessary if they are going to be able to do an emotionally difficult job successfully (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2013; Waddington, 1999). For a detention officer to be good at their job, one could argue that they have to be able to look in the mirror and respect what they see.

Immigration detention centres are often described as deeply paradoxical places (Bosworth, 2013, 2014; Bosworth and Slade, 2014). Immigration detainees are often represented as criminal, risky, and dangerous (Bosworth and Turnbull, 2015). In many jurisdictions, risk is seen as an important part of their raison d’etre. On the other hand, politicians and activists often point to the fact that detainees are not criminals, despite the prison-like conditions they are being offered (Ugelvik, 2013). Where the prison estate may be said to enjoy an innate legitimacy that flows from its position within the larger criminal justice system, Trandum’s legitimacy foundation is much more unstable. Even when they think that there are victims of miscarriage of justice, prisoners in regular prisons often think that the prison estate as a whole is legitimate (Schinkel, 2014). Detainees in immigration detention centres, on the other hand, frequently claim that the whole system is illegitimate and morally bankrupt, and that they are victims of institutional racism, plain and simple.

In the case of Trandum, this internal critique is weaved together with strong and persistent public sphere criticism. Trandum employees can regularly read in both print and social media that they work in the ‘Norwegian Guantanamo’. Officers are thus acutely aware of the fact that their authority is being routinely questioned both by detainees and external critics (Hall, 2010; Puthoopparambil et al., 2015). Bosworth (2014) describes how staff in immigration detention centres often struggle to understand the purpose of the institution and to create an appropriate, self-affirming identity. Officers in her study often displayed an ambivalent combination of understanding and cynicism. They often struggled to come to terms with the purpose of what they were doing. Seen together, the narratives described in this paper display the same ambivalence and (perhaps) self-doubt.

This is an important part of the narrative context for the stories I have described in this paper. The different types of stories may be seen as narrative resources targeted at different aspects of the legitimacy deficit officers experience. Stories about dangerous or deranged detainees are directed at critical voices claiming that Trandum is a prison for people who do not belong in a prison. Stories about the humanization of detainees are directed at claims that Trandum is a terrible place where people are treated badly. The stories are targeted at different kinds of implicit criticisms, but in a sense they accomplish the same thing. All four kinds of stories can be said to be part of the legitimacy structure that officers are trying to build and strengthen together; legitimacy, then, understood as a dynamically constructed composite structure. Understood as a whole, the narratives described in this paper all contribute to the task of talking a legitimate immigration detention centre staffed by competent and decent professionals into existence.

Although there are important differences between individual officers, and between officer sub-cultures, what I have tried to do in this paper is to describe stories, not types of people. In my experience, an officer can share a ‘war story’ about ‘flooring’ a nasty and dangerous detainee one minute, and talk – with pride – about that time s/he managed to diffuse a situation and avoid a fight the next. These humanizing stores are acknowledged and valued by detention officers, right next to stories about ‘dangerous others’.

I do not think these stories are unique to Trandum. Instead, I believe they can be seen as examples of a form of backstage narrative self-legitimation work that may be important for government representatives in general. Even in a democratic state with a strong focus on procedural legitimacy, the use of coercive force is an inherent part of state power. According to one influential view, the monopoly on legitimate violence is a core part of the very state definition (Weber, 2004 [1919]). Like police officers, detention centre officers regularly have to impose the will of the State on others as part of their professional role. Coercive authority is simultaneously a defining characteristic of the detention centre officer role, and a morally ambiguous part of actually embodying the ‘long arm of the law’. Legal legitimacy and procedural justice are important, but for the individuals in question, knowing that your acts comply with dusty, leather-bound law volumes is not enough. For officers engaging in emotionally difficult work, the sharing of stories that validate their actions as important, decent, and humane may help them make efficient intervention decisions when necessary. According to Bottoms and Tankebe (2012: 154): ‘front-line police officers and prison officers, […] have direct and recurrent encounters with citizens and prisoners, and therefore experience their authority being contested on a day-to-day basis.’ For the actual people representing the state, it is important that state goals are seen as relevant and attainable, at least in principle. Fairness, procedural justice, and legal legitimacy are important parts of the symbolic difference between being a dungeon keeper or turnkey on the one hand, and being a professional law enforcement officer on the other. In this paper, I have argued that these classical sources of legitimacy are not enough in themselves. They need to be mediated through stories to have local impact. Narratives are therefore an important part of what makes efficient government possible.