Detention and its discontents

Punishment and compliance within the U.K. detention estate through the lens of the withdrawal of Assisted Voluntary Return

Bibliographic Data

ID7843451
AuthorsSarah Walker (0000-0002-3417-6632, Goldsmiths University of London, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume45
Issue13
Pages2348-2365
Publication date2019-10-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Community (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369183x.2018.1443805
OpenAlexW2790649549
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited53

Detention centres and return programmes are increasingly important instruments of border control across Europe. In 2014, the U.K. Home Office removed Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) from detention, meaning it is no longer available to detainees. Drawing on both secondary data analysis of interviews with welfare staff in an Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) and Home Office senior managers and primary data from follow-on interviews with welfare staff and NGO workers, the paper analyses the Home Office rationale behind this withdrawal. Using this policy change as a lens reveals how through a responsibilisation discourse inherent in Home Office policy the subject of the ‘detainee’ is criminalised and framed as non-compliant and thus undeserving of ‘privileges’, such as AVR, in an increasingly punitive space. In contrast, both welfare officers and NGO workers frame detainees in a more nuanced, sometimes contradictory, manner; recognising the role of the state in creating vulnerabilities. By examining how dominant forms of discrimination are held in place by the banal ways categories are repeated in everyday discourse, this paper highlights the increasing pathologisation of deviance and framing of detainees as criminal ‘other’. As such it contributes to debates on the contradictory world of detention and the sociology of punishment

Criminology · Deportation · Immigration · Immigration detention · Political science · Punitive damages · Sociology · Welfare · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology · Social Psychology

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