1st Edition
Immigration Detention and Social Harm The Collateral Impacts of Migrant Incarceration
This interdisciplinary edited collection is the first internationally to comprehensively explore the harms immigration detention imposes beyond the ‘detainee’. Bringing together research from North America, the UK, Europe and Australia, it shows how the harms immigration detention imposes ramify beyond singular bodies, moments and locations – reverberating through families and communities and echoing across time.
The book is structured in three parts. Part One: Human Costs, examines the harms immigration detention imposes on people who are not personally incarcerated, but whose lives are nonetheless entangled with detention regimes. Part Two: Societal Consequences highlights the corrosive impacts of immigration detention at the societal level, including the role migrant incarceration plays in naturalising and perpetuating inequalities and injustices. Part Three: Ending the Harm interrogates the possibilities of detention reform and detention abolition.
This book will be a key reference text for scholars and students in the social and behavioural sciences who are interested in immigration detention, human rights and/or incarceration.
Introduction: The Reverberating Harms of Immigration Detention
Michelle Peterie
Part 1: Human Costs
1. “If I Talk About It, I Start Crying”: Children's Responses to Parental Immigration Imprisonment in the US
Caitlin Patler, Gabriela Gonzalez, Monica Cardenas Guzman and Guillermo Paez Gallardo
2. Detention in the Community: Complex Ripple Effects on Young Adults in the US
Joanna Dreby and Tsveta Dobreva
3. Bonds Strengthened, Strained, and Severed: The Effects of US Immigration Detention on Family Cohesion
Mirian G. Martinez-Aranda and Tamara Black
4. Immigration Detention and UK Families
Melanie Griffiths and Candice Morgan-Glendinning
5. Moral Injury in Australian Immigration Detention
Michelle Peterie
6. UK Immigration Detention, Exhaustion and the Politics of Care
Alexandra Hall
7. Australian Immigration Detention and its Impact on Healthcare Workers and the Australian Healthcare Community
Ryan Essex and Erika Kalocsányiová
Part 2: Societal Consequences
8. Gender, Violence and Regimes of Vulnerability in Immigration Detention: A Transnational Analysis
Francesca Esposito and Mary Bosworth
9. Immigration Detention as Racialised Wealth Extraction
Emily Ryo and Christopher Levesque
10. Immunised and Indifferent to Indefinite Incarceration: The Corrosive Effect of Immigration Detention Laws on Officialdom
Peter Billings
11. Executive Control Over Immigration Detention Policy and Practice in Australia
Amy Nethery and Cassandra Le Good
Part 3: Ending The Harm
12. Accessing Information on Immigration Detention in Canada: Towards Carceral Transparency to Reduce Social Harm
Sarah Turnbull and Joao Velloso
13. Advancing Abolitionism: Why the Immigration Detention Industry Must End
Victoria Canning
Biography
Dr Michelle Peterie is a Research Fellow in Sociology in the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies and School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Sydney. Peterie’s research investigates the impacts of social policies and practices on individual and collective wellbeing. Taking a person-centred approach – and in close collaboration with research participants and third-sector stakeholders – her work seeks to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, families and communities. Peterie is the author of Visiting Immigration Detention: Care and Cruelty in Australia’s Asylum Seeker Prisons (Bristol University Press, 2022), the co-author of Compulsory Income Management in Australia and New Zealand: More Harm than Good? (Policy Press, 2022), and the co-editor of Emotions in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2019). She has been invited to give expert evidence to the Australian Senate, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Crown Solicitor, and her research has received national media attention.
This riveting, timely collection of essays critically documents and exposes the wholly negative consequences of immigration detention around the world, precisely as detention is increasingly centred in national and international immigration and border enforcement strategies. Using an original lens of ‘social’ harm, contributors shift public and scholarly attention to how the impacts of detention reverberate far beyond the place and time of detention. Through a variety of rich, well-researched case studies, this book powerfully illustrates that not only does detention fail to achieve policymakers’ stated goals, but it also causes long-lasting, painful, unnecessary harms to families, communities, economies, and societies.
Nancy Hiemstra, Associate Professor at Stony Brook University, US
This book delivers a powerful message as it guides the reader through often overlooked dimensions of immigration detention. It demonstrates how the formulation and delivery of this practice harms not only those detained, their family and friends but society more broadly. In the introduction Michelle Peterie establishes the value of social harm as the conceptual frame of analysis. Through this lens the authors collectively destabilise moral and ethical justifications typically used to sustain the practice and expose the limits of political interest. I highly recommend this important work to scholars and students across disciplinary areas such as sociology, politics, criminology, policy making and law, as well as more general readers seeking to better understand this complex topic.
Melissa Bull, Professor Queensland University of Technology, Australia
