Michelle Peterie (ed) (2025). Immigration detention and social harm – The collateral impacts of migrant incarceration. Routledge.
Reviewed by Emma Patchett, Northumbria Law School, Northumbria University.
In the context of the punitive and prolific escalation of – typically arbitrary – detention in the US (Laughland 2025), this timely collection of essays highlights the ways that carceral spaces of migration control perpetuate harm. This book focuses on immigration detention as a social harm which has collateral effects beyond detention, through the experiences of the family and community of the person detained. By exploring the conceptualisation of immigration detention through a ‘social harm framework’, it seeks to ‘illuminate the reverberations of harm within and beyond detention centre walls’ (p. 2). Rather than focusing on the bodies of those in detention then, this edited collection addresses the broader proliferation of harm that permeates all those impacted by migration control and practices of detention, including indirectly. Harm thus spreads or seeps out as a relational affect of interaction within a space filtered through the permutations of migration control (Bosworth 2019). This collection draws attention to, and makes visible, the structures which perpetuate the ‘rippling harms immigration detention implies’ (pp. 3-4).
The book is organised into three sections. The first considers how detention impacts on those who are not directly detained, such as family and community members. This builds on scholarly research which has sought to contend with the expanding spaces and effects of immigration detention (Mountz 2011; Conlon, Hiemstra & Mountz 2017). The second section considers the structural consequences of immigration detention in the context of structural power imbalances, and the third considers how such harms might be challenged or addressed. The collection reflects extensive research involving a range of mixed methods and methodologies, including ethnographic studies, interviews, testimonies, and doctrinal research into detention legislation and case law. Case studies are mainly focused on Western jurisdictions, primarily the US, the UK and Australia.
The collection skilfully navigates across three key themes of particular interest when reflecting on carcerality and confinement in this context. The first is that of visibility – how harms are both visible and invisible – and the ways in which they might manifest in carceral spaces (space which, again, ‘spreads out’). In this way, as Francesca Esposito and Mary Bosworth observe in their chapter, entrenched racialised and gendered hierarchies of vulnerability, as manifestations of structures of power, are deliberately rendered invisible by the state. Elsewhere in the collection, Caitlin Patler, Gabriela Gonzalez, Monica Cardenas Guzman and Guillermo Paez Gallardo draw on interviews with 26 children of detainees in the US to highlight the psychological impact of parents’ detention on their children. They show that while such an impact is sometimes visible, much of it is ‘internalised and directed inward’ (pp. 20-21). More broadly, in relation to visibility and invisibility, Amy Nethery and Cassandra Le Good assert that the detention regime is ‘characterised by non-transparency and secrecy’ (p. 207). In this vein, Sarah Turnbull and Joao Velloso argue that a demand for transparency might offer a means of reducing the social harm caused by detention.
It is also valuable to consider how immigration detention differs from prison – and this distinction is most clearly realised through what might be called a form of spatio-temporal rupture, a second theme which emerges powerfully across this collection. This builds on considerable work in carceral geography to document how a particular ‘threshold’ space is constructed in detention (Moran, Gill and Conlon, 2016). This is illustrated in immigration detention, as Caitlin Patler et al point out, by the absence of a clear or set timeline for detention, no court sentence, no end point: for example, the children of detainees often do not know if or when their parent will be released or deported. Both Patler et al and Mirian G. Martinez-Aranda and Tamara Black describe this as ‘shared’ or ‘collective’ liminality, a mutual condition resulting from the damage inflicted on familial networks through this ‘spatio-temporal rupture’.
The uncertainty about release from immigration detention renders this form of incarceration distinct from that of the penal system. In the latter, sentencing practices in relation to criminal offences tend to follow an established process, ostensibly marked by procedural fairness and the rule of law. Immigration detention, however, is notoriously opaque and arbitrary. A Melanie Griffiths and Candice Morgan-Glendinning write, the immigration detention regime induces a ‘temporal uncertainty’ (p. 65), particularly in the UK and Australia, where there is no maximum time limit for detention. It also relies on spatial separation, where detainees are stuck in a threshold space prior to potential removal. The space of detention appears, therefore, as a space of deliberately violent banality both for the detainees and, as Alexandra Hall, Ryan Essex and Erika Kalocsányiová observe, for those who work in the detention centres. Echoing Hannah Arendt, this banality is a process of functionalising mundane practices of attrition, grounded in the thoughtless emptiness of routine (Segarra and Prasad 2018). This echoes the impact of the broader ‘spatio-temporal tactics of global migration management’ which centres around erasure, ‘fatigue and distress’ (p.108).
Whilst the effects of incarceration on the community of those detained can also be far-reaching and long-lasting, the trauma from immigration detention arguably spreads out in a different way given that a structural feature of the system is to leave detainees ‘stuck in this in-between status’ (p. 53), in legal limbo. There is an explicitly temporal uncertainty and ongoing precarity experience by those subject to migration control, given the political fluctuations of border politics and the slow churn of a procedure nominally predicated on administrative governance but simultaneously operating through the threat and imposition of criminal penalties (Menjívar et al 2018). This ‘in-between status’ fosters uncertainty about whether a detainee’s ‘future’ lies in either expulsion to another, often unfamiliar, country or (potentially limited) release. Accordingly, in spatial terms, ‘the lived experiences of detention spiral outward’ (Joanna Dreby and Tsveta Dobreva, p.33), evidenced by the adverse impacts of this system on young adults who have a family or community member in detention. The effect is that detention unfolds as a lingering spectre over their lives, and poignantly, as a central feature of their own biographical narratives as US citizens. This manifests in multiple forms across communities, from psychological trauma to financial exploitation and long-term wealth extraction.
A third theme is the manifestation of harm as a negation of human subjectivity, in the context of detention. This collection of studies presents a diverse range of ways in which the effects of harm in the carceral shapes of detention might be measured, tracked, and articulated. Drawing on in-depth interviews with detention centre visitors in Australia, Michelle Peterie writes of the harm induced through detention as a form of dehumanisation, ‘moral injury’ or ‘emotional wounding’, stripping away at the personhood of detainees (p. 84). As Alexandra Hall writes, this wounding takes place not as a visible injury but rather a negation of the body, reflecting a sustained ‘biopolitics of exhaustion’, where those in detention are ‘dissembled into abstract needs’, (pp. 103-109). In other words, subjectivity becomes defined solely through the flat dimensions of incarceration. Building on this, Victoria Canning (pp.239-241) identifies four types of harm: ‘autonomy, temporal, relational and gendered’. Canning argues that this can be read through a spatio-temporal framework predicated on violent exclusion and negation of such bodies in ‘liminal spaces’. Whilst attempts at reform have reflected an acknowledgement of the discourse of the vulnerability of the carceral subject, the relationalities of power inherent in immigration detention mean that this vulnerability is simultaneously being produced and maintained (Turnbull, 2024).
The metaphor that runs throughout the collection is found in the phrase, ‘harms that ripple’. Water metaphors are often employed in socio-political and media discussions of migration – from the imminent threat of a tidal wave of immigrants, or the need to control a ‘flood’ of refugees (Gormon 2019). Rippling is a small wave or series of waves, a sound or feeling which spreads, unstoppable but slow, soft and often imperceptible, in contrast to metaphors of carcerality which are often concrete manifestations of confinement and control (Fludernik 2019). Perhaps, therefore, immigration detention and its multiple effects point to a new understanding of carceral harms as more fluid and insidious and without clear oversight or constitutional protections (for non-citizens). Consequently, thinking about harms in this way, as having a rippling effect, suggests we need a distinctive spatio-temporal framework in which to conceptualise resistance and an end to the harm of detention, as a harm that ‘ripples out’. This would build on other forms of carceral abolitionism whilst being attentive to the distinctiveness of this form of border control.
Nevertheless, it is particularly valuable that the research in this collection continually engages with forms of agency and resistance amongst those impacted by detention. The value of this book lies in the way in which it contests hegemonic narratives of those who experience detention as bodies without agency, showing how resistance is enacted by families and communities beyond the ‘walls’ of detention. I do wonder however, whether, despite the value in acknowledging the ‘radiating’ impact of harms, this may risk taking us far away from the very real effects of the system on those who are detained (or at risk of being detained). Whilst it is right to insist that detention has far-reaching consequences and potentially harms us all, there may be a risk that an insistence on diffusion potentially ‘flattens’ out the immediate manifestations of harm on those subject to this particular form of migration control (Kemp 2024).
It would be interesting for further collections on carcerality in immigration detention to engage with research beyond these jurisdictions – particularly given the expansion of extra-territoriality and policies of externalisation in border control (Freedman 2024). This collection is a timely and informative addition to the discourse on immigration detention and the construction of carceral spaces, that will be both engaging and significant for those working in a number of fields.
Bibliography
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