Mary Bosworth
Biographic Data
| ID | 101198 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mary Bosworth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mary |
| FAMILY NAME | Bosworth |
| SIGNATURE | BOSWORTH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7750-5109 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 615 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
The culture of (border) control in Britain: Staff, precarity and distress
In this paper, we describe key findings from a survey of ‘staff culture’ that we designed and then administered to 170 private-sector custodial officers employed on the immigration detainee escorting contract in the United Kingdom in 2023. The ‘Detainee Escorting Staff Survey’ (DESS) offers the first independent measure of staff attitudes to and experiences of enforcing this form of border control. The final part of a multi-year, mixed-method stu…
Border Control and the Degradation of Labour
This article uses testimonies from private sector staff about their experiences of working in sites of short-term immigration detention and in facilitating deportation, to explore the material conditions of this form of custodial labour. Until now, most criminological accounts of criminal justice or border staff have paid little attention to them as workers. As a result, the connections between sites and practices of custody and capital have been…
The mother seems to traumatize her child: Examining empathy, denial, and responsibility in day-to-day encounters of families and staff in immigration detention in Canada
Immigration detention and juxtaposed border controls on the French north coast
In this article, I build on criminological accounts of immigration detention by examining British short-term holding facilities located on French territory in the ports of Calais and Dunkerque and the policies and treaties that govern them. For a number of reasons, including barriers to research access, their legal complexity, and their modest size and nature, these institutions have received little empirical or theoretical scrutiny. Yet, as I sh…
Criminalisation, race, and citizenship in UK border control
In this article, I draw on ongoing qualitative research on immigration detention and deportation in the UK, to explore the contribution of criminology to debates over citizenship. I pay particular attention to the interdependence of the state and the private sector in enforcing border control, examining how public-private collaboration both legitimates but also depends on a shifting, racialised criminalisation of foreigners. In so doing, I show h…
The Politics of Pain in Immigration Detention
In this paper I draw on qualitative material from the first complete data set of the ‘ Measure of the Quality of Life in Detention’ (MQLD) survey in the UK to reflect on its implication for understanding and challenging these sites. While similarities between immigration detention centres and prisons make it tempting to place the testimonies from people in detention within the framework of the ‘pains of imprisonment’, I propose an alternative rea…
Blurred lines: Detaining asylum seekers in Britain and France
In this article, we explore the use of immigration detention for asylum seekers in Britain and France who are awaiting removal to other European Union (EU) member states for processing under the terms of the Dublin Convention. As we will show, the emphasis on risk assessment as the grounds for detaining these people recasts humanitarian protections as security matters, effectively folding asylum seekers into a broader criminalisation of migration…
Understanding and coping with immigration detention: Social identity as cure and curse
Over 29,000 foreign nationals are detained yearly in British Immigration Removal Centres for undefined periods. This study investigated the role played by social identities in the way detainees are affected by, make sense of, and deal with detention. An opportunity sample of 40 detainees was interviewed on topics including support, identity, and well‐being, and data were analysed using theoretical thematic analysis. Participants struggled with lo…
Borders and justice
In this piece I offer an overview of the theme section and reflect on the relationship between academic studies and social justice. By comparing anthropology with my home discipline of criminology, I point to some shared and distinct contributions practitioners in these fields can make to our understanding about border control. Without being too pessimistic, I warn about the limits of 'humanizing' research subjects as a means to bring about progr…
Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control
In an era of mass mobility, those who are permitted to migrate and those who are criminalized, controlled, and prohibited from migrating are heavily patterned by race. By placing race at the centre of its analysis, this volume brings together fourteen essays that examine, question, and explain the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control. Through the lens of race, we see how criminal justice and migration enmesh in orde…
‘Working in this Place Turns You Racist’
Drawing on fieldwork in two British immigration removal centres (IRCs), this chapter discusses staff accounts of race and racism in detention. Designed as places to expel unwanted foreign citizens, IRCs are highly racialized institutions as nearly all residents within them are members of an ethnic minority. What is it like to work in such places? How, if at all, do staff members internalize or promote ideas about race and racialization? What happ…
Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control
In the introductory chapter the editors discuss why a volume that brings together race, migration, and criminal justice, in a way that speaks to issues of belonging, is both timely and necessary. In highlighting the gaps in various disciplinary literatures including the sociology of migration, criminology, and immigration law, this collection of essays discusses explicitly how concerns about race and ethnicity animate many of the state and popula…
Affect and authority in immigration detention
Drawing on a long-term research project across a number of British Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs), this article considers the relationship between authority and affect. In contrast to much criminological literature on the prison, which advances a liberal political account in which power is constantly negotiated and based on mutual recognition, in detention, this article suggests, staff authority rests on an abrogation of their self rather tha…
Racialization through Enforcement: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging
Immigration law and enforcement choices have enhanced the salience of Latino racial identity in the United States. Yet, to date, courts and administrative agencies have proven remarkably reluctant to confront head on the role of race in immigration enforcement practices. Courts improperly conflate legal nationality and ‘national origin’, thereby cloaking in legality impermissible profiling based on national origin. Courts also maintain the primac…
Women and border policing at the edges of Europe
While states around the world have responded to mass mobility by increasing border policing, our knowledge of the daily reality of that form of policing remains limited. How migrant women are policed has been particularly neglected. The political and practical difficulty of examining the context, process and experience of border control practices appears often to be insurmountable. This article contributes to filling some of the gaps in our knowl…
Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women's Prisons
This book explores how power is negotiated in women’s prisons. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in three penal establishments in England, it analyses how women manage the restrictions of imprisonment and the manner in which they attempt to resist institutional control. It is proposed that power is negotiated on a private, individual level, as women often resist the institution simply by trying to maintain an image of control over their own lives. H…
Punishment, globalization and migration control: ‘Get them the hell out of here’
This article considers the future of punishment in a world shaped by competing and reinforcing forces of globalization and nationalism. In it, we call for a wider conversation about the growing interdependence between criminal justice and migration control and of its implications for many of the key concepts and approaches within the field of punishment and society. The article examines the renewed salience of defending borders and drawing bounda…
In Memoriam Nicole Hahn Rafter
Immigration Detention, Punishment and the Transformation of Justice
In this article, I examine the changing nature of punishment under conditions of mass mobility. Drawing on research conducted in immigration removal centres in the UK, I will show how porous boundaries between administrative penalties and criminal penalties have made the two systems co-constitutive and, in so doing, have drawn into question the liberal foundations of punishment. As foreigners face additional, administrative burdens and are subjec…
Punishment, citizenship and identity: An Introduction
This collection of articles addresses the interconnections between punishment, citizenship and identity. As immigration and crime control measures have intersected, prisons in a number of countries have ended up housing a growing population of foreign-national offenders and immigration detainees. It is somewhat surprising that criminologists have traditionally spent so little time exploring the relationship between the prison and national identit…
Doing research in immigration removal centres: Ethics, emotions and impact
Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) are deeply contested institutions that rarely open their doors to independent research. In this article we discuss some of the complications we faced in conducting the first national British study of everyday life in them. As we will set out, research relationships were difficult to forge due to low levels of trust and unfamiliarity with academic research. At the same time, many participants had unrealistic expe…
Inside Immigration Detention
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…
Guest Editor Introduction for Special Issue on Borders, Gender and Punishment
In 2003, Punishment & Society ran a special issue on migration and punishment documenting the harshening of penal rhetoric and practices against migrants. Since then the scale of movement and the securitization of the border has only increased. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, scholars in the field of ‘punishment and society’ have, for the most part, paid little attention to the treatment of non-citizens either at the borders or in the crimina…
In search of recognition: Gender and staff–detainee relations in a British immigration removal centre
In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status…
The Borders of Punishment: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Exclusion
This book critically assesses the relationship between immigration control, citizenship, and criminal justice. It reflects on the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by mass mobility and its control and sets out a particular sub-field within criminology — the criminology of mobility. Drawing together leading international scholars with newer researchers, the book systematically outlines why criminology and criminal justice should pay …
Subjectivity and identity in detention: Punishment and society in a global age
This article draws on ethnographic research that I conducted in five British immigration removal centres from November 2009 to June 2011, and considers the challenges these institutions pose to our understanding of penal power. These centres contain a complex mix of foreign national citizens including former and current asylum seekers, those without visas, visa over-stayers and post-sentence foreign national prisoners. For many non-British offend…
Doing Prison Research: Views From Inside
This article is coauthored by four prisoners and a prison-researcher. In it, the authors discuss the differing aims and aspirations of research participants and scholars and their implications for doing prison research. Unlike most other accounts of prison research, the authors stress the experience of those being interviewed rather than that of the interviewer. The authors pay particular attention to the emotional nature of being part of a study…
Labelling the Victims of Sex Trafficking: Exploring the Borderland between Rhetoric and Reality
In this article we discuss findings from a small scoping study into the experiences of victims of trafficking and those who work with them. We use testimonies from our interviews to examine issues of choice, slavery and escape. We challenge some of the current language and terminology in the literature on trafficking and call for a more nuanced appreciation of the relationship between agency and victimization
Reassessing Resistance: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Prison
The relationship between power and resistance behind prison walls has long animated sociological discussions of imprisonment. In this article we advance a fresh understanding of resistance that recognizes the multi-faceted dimensions of prisoner agency while acknowledging the dangers in simply valorizing the strategies of the confined to subvert penal power. For us the importance of resistance is that it makes explicit the connections between eve…
Governing Through Migration Control: Security and Citizenship in Britain
Expanding mechanisms of border control increasingly depend on the criminalization of non-citizens. While some criminology scholarship might suggest such measures announce an increasing governance of migration ‘through crime’, we argue that it is not simply a case of punitive crime control strategies leaching into migration policies. Not only are foreigners in a far more vulnerable position to the British citizen, but the restrictions they face pl…
Punishment, globalization and migration control: ‘Get them the hell out of here’
This article considers the future of punishment in a world shaped by competing and reinforcing forces of globalization and nationalism. In it, we call for a wider conversation about the growing interdependence between criminal justice and migration control and of its implications for many of the key concepts and approaches within the field of punishment and society. The article examines the renewed salience of defending borders and drawing bounda…
Immigration Detention, Punishment and the Transformation of Justice
In this article, I examine the changing nature of punishment under conditions of mass mobility. Drawing on research conducted in immigration removal centres in the UK, I will show how porous boundaries between administrative penalties and criminal penalties have made the two systems co-constitutive and, in so doing, have drawn into question the liberal foundations of punishment. As foreigners face additional, administrative burdens and are subjec…
Creating the responsible prisoner: Federal admission and orientation packs
This article examines official management practices and rhetoric in the US federal prison system as they are set out in admission handbooks that are distributed to inmates on arrival. Using concrete examples from contemporary and historical admission manuals I examine the changing language and style of prison governance. Concentrating in particular on the contemporary documents, I show how many of the ideas articulated in the literature on risk a…
The Past as a Foreign Country? Some Methodological Implications of Doing Historical Criminology
This article describes methodological issues that arose from the author's research on early modern women's imprisonment in order to reflect on broader questions about how crime and punishment are studied. She demonstrates that the ways in which a criminologist interprets his or her data, what evidence exists, and the emotional repercussions of writing on crime and punishment reveal the researcher's ethical stance towards his or her subjects and t…
Doing research in immigration removal centres: Ethics, emotions and impact
Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) are deeply contested institutions that rarely open their doors to independent research. In this article we discuss some of the complications we faced in conducting the first national British study of everyday life in them. As we will set out, research relationships were difficult to forge due to low levels of trust and unfamiliarity with academic research. At the same time, many participants had unrealistic expe…
Border Control and the Limits of the Sovereign State
As has been widely recognized and commented upon, border controls across Europe and America have been strenuously tightened since September 11th. In fact, of course, the movement of certain non-citizens in and around most western, industrialized countries had been restricted for some time predating the advent of the `war on terror'. In this article I will explore the particular use being made in Britain of criminal justice rhetoric and policy as …
Confining Femininity: A History of Gender, Power and Imprisonment
In this article, the author suggests that criminological accounts of the birth of the prison have been characterised by an unacknowledged chronological and gender bias. Rather than being the result of a global transformation in the ideology of punishment, as most authors have suggested with regard to men, the imprisonment of women was marked by significant continuities in forms and ideologies of punishment from the early modern period. To show th…
Deportation, detention and foreign-national prisoners in England and Wales
This article examines the detention and deportation of time-served foreign-national prisoners in England and Wales. Drawing on penal policy and interviews with staff and detainees in prisons and immigration removal centres, it critically assesses the growing interdependence of the UK Border Agency and HM Prison Service. While the removal of failed asylum seekers has generated widespread concern and activism, the deportation of foreign ex-prisoner…
Affect and authority in immigration detention
Drawing on a long-term research project across a number of British Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs), this article considers the relationship between authority and affect. In contrast to much criminological literature on the prison, which advances a liberal political account in which power is constantly negotiated and based on mutual recognition, in detention, this article suggests, staff authority rests on an abrogation of their self rather tha…
Globalization, ethnicity and racism: An introduction
Researching Trafficked Women: On Institutional Resistance and the Limits to Feminist Reflexivity
This article exposes methodological barriers we encountered in a small research project on women trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation and our attempts, drawing on feminist and emergent methods, to resolve them. It critically assesses the role of institutional gatekeepers and the practical challenges faced in obtaining data directly from trafficking victims. Such difficulties, it suggests, spring at least in part from lingering disagr…
Understanding and coping with immigration detention: Social identity as cure and curse
Over 29,000 foreign nationals are detained yearly in British Immigration Removal Centres for undefined periods. This study investigated the role played by social identities in the way detainees are affected by, make sense of, and deal with detention. An opportunity sample of 40 detainees was interviewed on topics including support, identity, and well‐being, and data were analysed using theoretical thematic analysis. Participants struggled with lo…
Women and border policing at the edges of Europe
While states around the world have responded to mass mobility by increasing border policing, our knowledge of the daily reality of that form of policing remains limited. How migrant women are policed has been particularly neglected. The political and practical difficulty of examining the context, process and experience of border control practices appears often to be insurmountable. This article contributes to filling some of the gaps in our knowl…
In search of recognition: Gender and staff–detainee relations in a British immigration removal centre
In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status…
The Politics of Pain in Immigration Detention
In this paper I draw on qualitative material from the first complete data set of the ‘ Measure of the Quality of Life in Detention’ (MQLD) survey in the UK to reflect on its implication for understanding and challenging these sites. While similarities between immigration detention centres and prisons make it tempting to place the testimonies from people in detention within the framework of the ‘pains of imprisonment’, I propose an alternative rea…
Theorizing Race and Imprisonment: Towards a New Penality
Resistance and compliance in women’s prisons: Towards a critique of legitimacy
Penal moderation in the United States: Yes we can
Blurred lines: Detaining asylum seekers in Britain and France
In this article, we explore the use of immigration detention for asylum seekers in Britain and France who are awaiting removal to other European Union (EU) member states for processing under the terms of the Dublin Convention. As we will show, the emphasis on risk assessment as the grounds for detaining these people recasts humanitarian protections as security matters, effectively folding asylum seekers into a broader criminalisation of migration…
Racialization through Enforcement: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging
Immigration law and enforcement choices have enhanced the salience of Latino racial identity in the United States. Yet, to date, courts and administrative agencies have proven remarkably reluctant to confront head on the role of race in immigration enforcement practices. Courts improperly conflate legal nationality and ‘national origin’, thereby cloaking in legality impermissible profiling based on national origin. Courts also maintain the primac…
Resistance and compliance in women’s prisons: Towards a critique of legitimacy
Race and Punishment
Confining Femininity: A History of Gender, Power and Imprisonment
In this article, the author suggests that criminological accounts of the birth of the prison have been characterised by an unacknowledged chronological and gender bias. Rather than being the result of a global transformation in the ideology of punishment, as most authors have suggested with regard to men, the imprisonment of women was marked by significant continuities in forms and ideologies of punishment from the early modern period. To show th…
New Directions in Prison Studies: Some Introductory Comments
Reassessing Resistance: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Prison
The relationship between power and resistance behind prison walls has long animated sociological discussions of imprisonment. In this article we advance a fresh understanding of resistance that recognizes the multi-faceted dimensions of prisoner agency while acknowledging the dangers in simply valorizing the strategies of the confined to subvert penal power. For us the importance of resistance is that it makes explicit the connections between eve…
Anatomy of a Massacre: Gender, Power, and Punishment in Revolutionary Paris
This article describes the massacre of 35 women in the Paris Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in September 1792. The killing of the women in the city's largest prison-hospital complex for women was a unique event in the French Revolution's history because it was the only all-female institution targeted during the September Massacres. Using archival documents, the author explores what the violence against women in Salpêtrière suggests about gender and pu…
The Past as a Foreign Country? Some Methodological Implications of Doing Historical Criminology
This article describes methodological issues that arose from the author's research on early modern women's imprisonment in order to reflect on broader questions about how crime and punishment are studied. She demonstrates that the ways in which a criminologist interprets his or her data, what evidence exists, and the emotional repercussions of writing on crime and punishment reveal the researcher's ethical stance towards his or her subjects and t…
Women in Prison: Gender and Social Control
It is old news that the conditions and policies of women's prisons are different from those of incarcerated men. Less evident, however, is how gender differences shape those policies, and how gender identity and roles shape women's adaptation and resistance to prison culture and control. Women in Prison explores how the gender-based attitudes that women bring to prison frame how they respond to the prison environment—and how gender stereotypes co…
Gender, Risk, and Recidivism
Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences, edited by David Garland
Theorizing Race and Imprisonment: Towards a New Penality
Doing Prison Research: Views From Inside
This article is coauthored by four prisoners and a prison-researcher. In it, the authors discuss the differing aims and aspirations of research participants and scholars and their implications for doing prison research. Unlike most other accounts of prison research, the authors stress the experience of those being interviewed rather than that of the interviewer. The authors pay particular attention to the emotional nature of being part of a study…
Self‐harm in Women's Prisons
Creating the responsible prisoner: Federal admission and orientation packs
This article examines official management practices and rhetoric in the US federal prison system as they are set out in admission handbooks that are distributed to inmates on arrival. Using concrete examples from contemporary and historical admission manuals I examine the changing language and style of prison governance. Concentrating in particular on the contemporary documents, I show how many of the ideas articulated in the literature on risk a…
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California * The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America
The Relation between Neighborhood Built Environment and Walking Activity among Older Adults
The association of neighborhood built environment with walking activity has received growing attention, although most studies have relied upon subjective measures of the built environment and few have examined the relation between built environment and walking among older adults. This 2001 study examined the relation between objectively measured characteristics of the local neighborhood and walking activity among a sample of 546 community-dwellin…
Globalization, ethnicity and racism: An introduction
Border Control and the Limits of the Sovereign State
As has been widely recognized and commented upon, border controls across Europe and America have been strenuously tightened since September 11th. In fact, of course, the movement of certain non-citizens in and around most western, industrialized countries had been restricted for some time predating the advent of the `war on terror'. In this article I will explore the particular use being made in Britain of criminal justice rhetoric and policy as …
Governing Through Migration Control: Security and Citizenship in Britain
Expanding mechanisms of border control increasingly depend on the criminalization of non-citizens. While some criminology scholarship might suggest such measures announce an increasing governance of migration ‘through crime’, we argue that it is not simply a case of punitive crime control strategies leaching into migration policies. Not only are foreigners in a far more vulnerable position to the British citizen, but the restrictions they face pl…
Explaining U.S. Imprisonment
This text builds on and extends some of the contemporary issues of women in prison, minorities, and the historical path to modern prisons, as well as the social influences on prison reform
What is Criminology?
Criminology is a booming discipline, yet one which can appear divided and fractious. The chapters in this book respond to a series of questions designed to investigate the state, impact, and future challenges of the discipline: What is criminology for? What is the impact of criminology? How should criminology be done? What are the key issues and debates in criminology today? What challenges does the discipline of criminology face? How has crimino…
What is criminology
Critically examining criminology's conceptual foundations, aims methods, boundaries and impact, this collection of essays by leading international criminologists examines the current state of the discipline
Penal moderation in the United States: Yes we can
Labelling the Victims of Sex Trafficking: Exploring the Borderland between Rhetoric and Reality
In this article we discuss findings from a small scoping study into the experiences of victims of trafficking and those who work with them. We use testimonies from our interviews to examine issues of choice, slavery and escape. We challenge some of the current language and terminology in the literature on trafficking and call for a more nuanced appreciation of the relationship between agency and victimization
Deportation, detention and foreign-national prisoners in England and Wales
This article examines the detention and deportation of time-served foreign-national prisoners in England and Wales. Drawing on penal policy and interviews with staff and detainees in prisons and immigration removal centres, it critically assesses the growing interdependence of the UK Border Agency and HM Prison Service. While the removal of failed asylum seekers has generated widespread concern and activism, the deportation of foreign ex-prisoner…
Sociology (48 works) · Criminology (47 works) · Political science (44 works) · Law (35 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (27 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (26 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Politics (22 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Immigration (21 works)