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Regulating mobility through detention: Understanding the new geography of control and containment at the Southern European border
Abstract
The aim of this article is to describe the evolution of immigration detention policies at the Southern European border. This will be done by presenting original data on the actual functioning of immigration detention in Italy in the wake of the so-called “refugee crisis”. By shedding light on these developments, the article reveals a notable convergence of first reception and return policies, which in turn is driving a transformation of the landscape of immigration detention leading to a proliferation of detention regimes and spaces of containment. Drawing on the literature on carceral geographies, this development is analyzed within the framework of Italy's distinct role in the geopolitics of EU border control policies. The article ultimately suggests that the immigration detention system has gradually been co-opted by the border control infrastructure, becoming part of a broader and intricate control assemblage whose essential function is the regulation of human mobility.
... Detention could be understood as a form of punishment or as a manifestation of the "preventive state", but in both cases scholars have argued that detention has become a tool for governments to target specific groups of migrants and to pursue both practical and symbolic functions through the selection of such groups. From a more operational perspective, scholars have argued that detention functions as a tool to "regulate human mobility" (Campesi 2024), and specifically as a "containing, bordering and excluding" device (Mountz et al. 2012). At the same time, its symbolic dimension -as a tool to reaffirm the state's power to exclude and to reinforce its authority -shall not be disregarded, especially in a context in which immigration reforms are led by populist parties. ...
Dating back to Italy’s first comprehensive immigration law in the 1990s, the practice of detaining irregular migrants has served various explicit and implicit purposes, both practical and symbolic. Two decrees passed in 2023, under the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni, were explicitly framed as responses to the increasing number of migrants arriving at the borders. The aim of these decrees was to prolong the detention of asylum seekers and irregular migrants, with the stated aim of increasing returns. However, despite these measures, available data suggests that the capacity of detention centres has not increased significantly, and the rate of returns has remained stable. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to explore the explicit and implicit functions of detention by examining recent reforms and publicly available quantitative data obtained through a request under Italy’s Freedom of Information Act. It suggests that whilst detention serves practical purposes for a minority of migrants, its symbolic role in conveying state sovereignty and strict border control is equally important.
Background This article examines the conditions and management of immigration detention centres in Spain and Italy. Methods The study analyses the reports of the Spanish Ombudsman and the Italian National Guarantor on visits to detention and internment centres for foreigners to identify similarities and differences in the functioning of these centres depending on the country. Using a qualitative content analysis approach with NVivo 14 software, 16 reports (10 Italian and 6 Spanish) published between 2018 and 2023 were analysed. The reports were selected based on comparability, excluding non-relevant or non-equivalent documents in both countries. Results The findings reveal deficiencies in health care, staff training, legal care, hygienic conditions, and transparency in managing removals in both countries. Additionally, there is an abuse of detention as a migration control measure and a de facto use of these centres as first reception centres. A significant difference is the length of detention, which is limited to 60 days in Spain compared to 180 days in Italy. Conclusions This analysis highlights the need for reforms to improve conditions in these centres, ensure respect for fundamental rights, and stop their use as first reception centres.
In 2012 we urged scholars to explore the extension of penal power through the “shadow carceral state.” The shadow carceral state operates through legally hybrid and institutionally serpentine forms that stretch beyond the criminal legal system. Theoretical Criminology's special issue invited us to reflect on the issues we raised in that piece. We are impressed by the transformation of punishment and society scholarship, which has grown deeper and more sophisticated with each wave of activism. Yet it will take more than a thriving subfield to confront the present and likely future: tenacious and expansive carceral and shadow carceral states that are continually deployed to address the compounding global crises of climate change, mass displacement, and structural poverty.
Despite being frequently invoked in everyday police work and immigration enforcement to justify coercive measures, public order and security remains an ambiguous legal concept. For EU citizens, the Citizens' Rights Directive stipulates public order and security grounds to provide a higher threshold against removals than criminal convictions alone. However, the removal grounds for EU citizens were founded on even less than criminal convictions in analysis of 100 removal orders for mobile Estonian and Romanian citizens in Finland. Ultimately, the removal orders relied on the assumption of future crimes and invoked a conception of 'dangerous individuals' with criminal tendencies, even based on single minor offences and administrative penal orders without criminal convictions. Notwithstanding various legal meanings, I argue that the required public order and security grounds for the removal of EU citizens corresponded to police conceptions of mobile populations as a potential source of criminality and a threat to social order.
Notwithstanding claims about the emergence of 'crimmigration' systems, immigration law and criminal law entail two different sets of instruments for authorities to control foreign nationals. Drawing on an analysis of removal orders for foreign offenders in Finland, this article demonstrates that significant administrative powers in immigration enforcement are employed largely autonomously from the criminal justice system. Immigration law enables the police and immigration officials to issue removal orders based on fines or penal orders for (suspected) minor offences, without obtaining criminal convictions. In addition to disproportionate administrative sanctions for foreign nationals, removal orders involve a preventive rationale targeting future risks for the society based on the assumed continuation of criminal activities. While criminal courts adjudicate all severe offences, punitive application of immigration law enables authorities to bypass criminal justice procedures and safeguards, resulting in a distinct, administrative punitive system for visiting third-country nationals.
This article discusses how administrative practices shape immigration detention policies, addressing both administrative discretion in detention orders and their judicial supervision. Due to vaguely formulated legal criteria and ineffective ex‐post judicial supervision, the authorities have considerable discretionary powers in ordering detentions for noncompliant and criminalized noncitizens. Instead of being a measure of last resort, immigration detention is used in a routine manner, with little individual assessment, for the enforcement of removals and the prevention of irregular migration, as well as extensively for crime prevention. The findings demonstrate the role of the police as the main actor in the detention system in Finland, with significant implications for the formation of detention policies.
The reception and protection system in Greece in the aftermath of the so-called refugee crisis produces a geography of specific mobility restrictions and accommodation types for migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees. These restrictions create a multi-layered landscape of displacement, dominated by three socio-spatial figurations: the forced containment of displaced people in ‘hotspots’ on eastern Aegean islands; staying in isolated and segregated camps in the mainland; and the accommodation of the most vulnerable in urban centres. At the same time, the mobility practices of displaced people often disrupt the above figurations, stemming from their survival practices and life aspirations, and largely relating to their translocal social connections. These mobilities include, but are not limited to, unregistered movements from hotspots to the mainland, mobilities from camp to camp, mobility negotiations between camp and city. This paper explores the figurations of displacement related to the impact of governance regimes on the livelihoods and mobility of displaced people in Greece. Within this frame, it focuses on the ways through which migrants and asylum-seekers negotiate, resist or transcend the geography of multiple restrictions, through translocal mobility practices that intervene and therefore reshape dominant socio-spatial figurations.
This volume analyses exclusion processes, segregation dynamics and the forms of discrimination of refugees and asylum seekers in Italy, where the reception system is marked by opaqueness and arbitrariness and is becoming increasingly similar to the model of “camps”. The numerous vibrant contributions present a fully-fledged system of inferiorization, characterised by labour exploitation, housing discomfort, meagre rights and control strategies, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to a sharp worsening of the health, work, housing and administrative conditions. A framework that has found opposition in the daily resistance and in the struggles of asylum seekers.
This chapter explores the relation between EU and domestic policy responses to migration in the context of Greece, one of the Member States most affected by migratory movements in 2015. Drawing on the analysis of EU and Greek legislation and policy on asylum and migration, I argue that principles of justice both in relation to Greece as a Member State and in relation to refugees have been significantly challenged. On the one hand, EU policies of containment placed disproportionate pressures on the Greek asylum and reception systems, while measures aimed at alleviating pressure, such as support by EASO and FRONTEX personnel and relocations of asylum seekers to other EU states, have been insufficient and fall short of EU principles of solidarity among Member States. On the other hand, legal and policy practices aimed at facilitating the implementation of the hotspot approach and returns to Turkey under the EU-Turkey statement—for instance, the use of the ‘safe third country’ and ‘inadmissibility’ concepts and the use of nationality as a criterion for accessing asylum and relocation—undermine the impartial application of asylum, protection and reception norms enshrined in EU and domestic law.
Since the 2015 refugee crisis the European asylum regime has been under critique for its shortcomings. In order to shed light on the effects of the implementation of the European asylum regime at the border islands, where 80 % of all refugee arrivals took place, I focus on Lesvos, the main island entry point, between 2015–2017. Based on empirical material and secondary sources I trace the evolution of the situation on the island from the increased arrivals of 2015 to the creation of a ‘prison island’ within two years. I operationalize the European asylum regime by looking at three aspects, namely, control, reception and protection. In doing so, I provide a periodization which captures the state of affairs when the arrivals started increasing, the course of events during the peak, and the consolidation of the new architecture of asylum at the island after the EU-Turkey statement. The article demonstrates how the prioritization of control, through confinement at the island, has been serving the goal of identification and registration while raising disproportionally the barriers to access international protection and leading to inhumane reception conditions.
During the fall 2015, Sweden had a large increase of asylum seekers, following an out-break of a civil war in Syria. As a consequence, the absorption capacity of the Swedish municipalities was stretched in terms of eg.schooling and housing. The parties were internally divided, and subsequently the differences of opinions were apparent within the same political bloc and were mirrored by divisions in the electorate, and in the public debate.
In this paper, we aim to describe the migration flows to Sweden in, before and after this period. We ask what are the policy consequences and discursive reactions to current transformations in migration flows in the party-political landscape, civil society and in popular attitudes? We show that the refugee crisis enabled a strong mobilization of both pro- and anti-migration positions. Norms of displaying international solidarity prevail and show in mundane practices, but are challenged by more restrictive positions and attitudes, concerning migration and integration. Sweden is no longer exceptional.
To investigate this polarization in greater detail, we have revisited official statistics, party programs and conducted focus group interviews with three representatives of pro-migration organizations and three individual interviews in order to gain insights into mobilizing activities of both pro- and anti-migration movements.
First, this paper conveys information about the migration flows to Sweden, before, during and after the refugee crisis of 2015. In especially 2016 Sweden had a heavy intake of asylum seekers to Sweden, which prompted legislative measures to manage it. Second, we emphasize transformations in the party-political landscape before, under and after the refugee crisis of 2015. In this period there was a rhetorical shift in mainstream politics; i. e. an emphasis on security to protect the Swedish model, previous political positions perceived of as extreme became normalized. When representatives of the political mainstream signal to the voters that they have lost control of the situation, this enables previously extreme hostile attitudes towards immigrants to appear as more credible, more mainstream. Politicisation breeds mobilization. Third, we study actions and reactions in the civil society. Examples of progressive change and bottom-up initiatives (sanctioned from above) co-exist with anti-migration demonstrations that gain increased confidence when also mainstream voices signal that the situation is out of control.
By way of conclusion, the crisis enabled a window of opportunity for the mobilization of both pro- and anti-migration sentiments in civil society. This paper provides many examples of efforts of inclusion in the civil society; of offering immediate assistance to the incoming refugees and also engagement for more long-term commitments to facilitate integration. At the same time, restrictive policies on immigration were implemented and, rhetorically an emphasis on security to defend the Swedish model became ingrained in the political mainstream. The Swedish society has become more diverse than before, and the newly arrived refugees are rather here to stay, than to moving on.
The article examines recent research on hotspots – the EU system for the management of incoming asylum seekers, implemented in Greece and Italy – to raise some questions on Europe’s relation to its external borders, and its others. Briefly discussing Abdelmalek Sayad’s writings on “state thinking” and the migrant condition, and drawing attention to the repeated failures that characterise the government of the external borders of the EU, we question Europe’s capacity to articulate its relation to the external world and to people on the move beyond the space of the border. This question, we think, will be central in the next European century.
This article focuses on the humanitarian geographies of the hotspots. It argues that hotspots are humanitarian in both idea and practice by raising two fundamental questions that form the basis for the article: what is humanitarianism, and who is it for? The article understands humanitarianism as a logic of government that is more expansive than the mainstream ideal that emerged in the 20th-century. Instead humanitarianism is understood as concerning logics developed to both effectively manage disaster and to secure (in both senses of the word) imminently mobile populations for the maintenance of liberal order alongside and through the securing of life. The article takes an expansive view of humanitarian government to consider genealogies of caring and population security logics in the establishment of modern, western and liberal states. The article unsettles some of the traditional geographical understandings of humanitarianism as care for distant strangers and considers the ways compassion is rationalised by the hotspot approach. This critical reading of humanitarianism and the hotspots offers empirical weight to what has been called ‘humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic’, through which humanitarianism is deployed to secure both life and a liberal political order across multiple scales.
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 boundaries between members and non-members, as well as the shifting focus of penal power from issues of imprisonment and morality, towards questions of immobilization and expulsion from the polity. By doing so, it also addresses the gaps in the existing theories and narratives about penality, which fail to take properly into account the implications of global connectivity, while overlooking enduring matters of racial and class inequity. Finally, the article points out how the progressive destabilization of citizenship and the precarity of membership and belonging are inimically linked to increasingly potent exhortations of penal power that affect us all.
The so-called 'refugee crisis' marks a crucial juncture in Italian politics. Tapping into the crisis of legitimacy of contemporary European politics, the controversy over migration has triggered discussion of socioeconomic, cultural and security issues. Pressured by public opinion, the EU and Italy have followed the logic of exceptionality, trying to put a halt to the inflow of asylum-seekers rather than pursuing the logic of normalcy that must apply to migration at a global level. Institutional and mainstream actors have mirrored public anxieties and security concerns, endorsing emergency narratives, aggressive policing and militarised border control. Unable to engage with citizens' concerns, they have helped to conflate migration with insecurity, creating a fertile breeding ground for xenophobic, populist reactions. The paper suggests that the refugee crisis is best understood in relation to other ongoing crises in the EU, and that the way it is handled will have significant consequences for future action, shaping the way European societies cope with forthcoming crises and transforming the relationship between states and citizens. Accordingly, it argues that the permanent state of emergency characterising governmental responses so far does not bode well for the future of liberal democracy in Europe. ARTICLE HISTORY
The present article discusses the gradual transformation of «hotspots» for migrants from sites of transit to places of detention and containment. Hotspots are intrinsically linked to the EU-Turkey Statement, as one of the means by which the Greek State now governs irregular migration. These facilities restrict freedom of movement, but also transform the islands hosting them into places of strandedness. The hotspots are thus transformed into a detention space. By exploring the transformation of the spatial, legal and policy framework, as well as the ways in which migrants attempt to overcome it, this piece analyses the reconfiguration of the Northern Aegean region into a buffer zone, and situate migrant agency within a developing policy context at the external borders of the European Union.
This chapter sets out the historical development, typologies, experiences, and impacts of immigration detention in Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), the European Union (EU), Canada, and the United States (US). While drawing attention to its historical roots, the analytical focus is primarily on the expanding policies and practices of detention in these places since the late 1990s and early twenty-first century. The aim of this chapter is to show the relevance of immigration detention to the field of criminology, including the ways in which this form of incarceration is similar to and different from ‘traditional’ penal logics and institutions. In doing so, it will highlight how immigration detention reflects the broadening reach of penal power and of race, gender, and postcolonial relations in a globalizing world.
Studies on immigration enforcement and bordered penality frequently depict immigration detention as a system of confinement enforced in closed, relatively opaque facilities geared towards the expeditious deportation of non-citizens. This notion is actually a synecdoche of the diverse forms of containment and the varying, more or less dispensable roles played by detention practices within immigration enforcement systems. This paper challenges this perspective by considering prominent changes taking place in the detention field across Europe, which can be seen as signals of a gradual detention crisis. In this respect, it explores the versatility of detention practices, which have made the detention system particularly resilient. Despite this resilience, though, the paper unveils and maps the obsolescence of detention centric models of immigration enforcement, which manifests itself in the jurisdictions in which detention systems either are largely irrelevant or have been shrinking in the recent past. Additionally, the paper examines the consolidation of the hotspot archipelago in Mediterranean Europe, which has expanded the containment capacity of the border control apparatus and made it increasingly plastic. Yet the hotspot system is in itself an additional manifestation of the obsolescence of detention-centric models of enforcement. After having scrutinised these different dimensions, the paper concludes by exploring the promises and pitfalls of a changing detention landscape and suggesting directions for future research.
This book analyses torture, inhuman and degrading treatment towards migrants worldwide, integrating overviews from several contexts and disciplines. It highlights that today migrants’ mistreatment is a global phenomenon, a frequent element of the migratory experience (in countries of departure, of transit, of arrival), an intrinsic component of state policies, and an extreme form of that structural violence which is inherent to the contemporary war on migrants at the global level.
The New Pact on Migration and Asylum contains two pieces of proposed legislation which raise several concerns. A closer look at the Proposal for a Screening Regulation and the Proposal for Crisis and Force Majeure Regulation reveals that the frontline States are obliged to become border guards in an exacerbated way. The legislation is excessively technical and unrelated to the capacities of the affected States and, as such, will be difficult, if not impossible, for frontline States to implement. The primary argument of this article is that the mechanisms of the New Pact that are intended to contain the arrival of migrants and to level the imbalances caused by the geographical location of the EU Member states with external borders will actually allow the derogation of migrants’ rights and will hardly compensate for the special circumstances faced by frontline EU States. Instead of balancing the burdens of migration among Member States, the weight will be disproportionately borne by the very States the legislations propose to relieve.
The crimmigration literature has underlined the increasing merging of criminal law and immigration law practices and procedures. Border criminology literature, in turn, has recently scrutinized the penal scenario in which this alleged fusion is taking place. Both pieces of scholarship, though, largely overlook the agonistic coexistence of border control interests and crime prevention aims, as well as the preference given to immigration enforcement arrangements over criminal law procedures in many jurisdictions. By drawing on a number of cases mainly—albeit not exclusively—taken from Spanish crimmigration policies, this article examines what may be called the ‘instrumentalism’ strategies that are notably transforming crime control practices targeting noncitizens, and the criminal justice system in its entirety.
The aim of this article is to explore the peculiarity of Italian policies on immigration detention and their evolution over time. This will be done by highlighting the main factors that might explain the apparent political disinvestment in immigration detention in Italy, in particular in the years between 2013 and 2015, and account for the turnaround in approach announced and then implemented by the two Interior Ministers in charge between 2017 and 2019. The article uses the Italian case as an opportunity to explore the functions that are assigned to immigration detention in destination countries. In particular, it considers whether or not it can be argued that immigration detention in Italy has been “reinvented” (meaning that its functions have somewhat changed) as a consequence of the so-called “refugee crisis” and in light of Italy’s specific position in the contemporary geopolitics of the EU’s border control regime.
This book offers a unique comparative assessment of the evolution of immigration detention systems in European Union member states since the onset of the “refugee crisis.” By applying an analytical framework premised on international human rights law in assessing domestic detention regimes, the book reveals the extent to which EU legislation has led to the adoption of laws and practices that may disregard fundamental rights and standards. While emphasizing policies and laws adopted in response to the “refugee crisis,” the volume also shows how these policies have evolved—and in many cases grown more restrictive—even as the “crisis” has begun to recede from the borders of many European countries. To sharpen awareness of contrasting developments across the region, the book’s country chapters are organised into geographic sections that reveal how variations in migration pressures have in some cases resulted in contrasting detention practices even as the EU directives have sought to harmonise immigration laws. A critical focus of the book are the evolving domestic norms related to grounds for detention, length of detention, non-custodial "alternatives to detention," the treatment of children, and conditions of detention. With its systematic and comparative assessment of immigration detention regimes across the EU, the book will be helpful for both academics and practitioners who seek a comprehensive guide to the evolution of one of today’s more important human rights dilemmas—states’ efforts to control global migration.
The aim of this article is to explore the ambiguous legal status of immigration detention by discussing the main theoretical perspectives on its nature and the functions it plays in contemporary migration policies. After presenting a typological and genealogical reconstruction of immigration detention, the article contends that it should not be seen as being related either to the politics of ‘exception’ or to the expanding reach of ‘penal’ power in a context of mass migration. Instead, the argument presented here is that immigration detention exhibits the characteristics of preventive measures typically related to the exercise of police powers and that its increased role in migration policies should be read in the wider framework of the shifting boundaries between the ‘penal’ and the ‘preventive’ state in contemporary societies.
Drawing on an empirical study, this article explores the role of immigration detention in Italy by analysing the way a specific rhetoric of ‘dangerousness’ has developed and is being used within the framework of immigration enforcement policies. Our argument is that immigration detention has been transformed into an instrument of crime prevention and ‘social defence’, and that this transformation is fuelled by the central position that the legal categories of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ have assumed in the regulation of the return procedure. The article contends that immigration law enforcement agencies can make use of immigration detention as a flexible control tool to manage what are perceived as the most problematic populations in urban areas, thus practising a policy of selective enforcement that while not explicitly built along racial and ethnic lines, clearly discriminates among migrants according to their ‘social marginality’ or supposed ‘social dangerousness’.
In light of the recent proliferation and co-presence of institutional and makeshift camps and encampments in Europe, this article explores the current multifaceted geographies of the camp and their formal and informal spatialities. By engaging with key work in ‘camp studies’ we analyse contemporary institutional and makeshift refugee camps in their complex relationship. While the review of the existing literature is a fundamental starting point for our analysis, in this article we propose to depart from a perspective exclusively focussed on institutional camps to incorporate a reflection on the informal encampments that have recently proliferated in Europe. In particular, we reflect on how these makeshift spatial formations are associated with the presence and workings of institutional camps, at times in a complementary, almost symbiotic relationship. We conclude by suggesting that camps should not be studied in isolation and that both institutional and informal camps should be examined as dynamic spaces that may be transformed and appropriated by their residents, becoming part of the current fragmented mobilities of irregular migrations across Europe and of the related political geographies of bordering, smuggling, and humanitarian care.
This article provides a critical review of key theoretical positions relevant to border control and sets out an agenda for developing these ideas. In 2005 Mythen and Walklate published a theoretical milestone for the study of terrorism in their article ‘Criminology and terrorism: Which thesis? Risk society or governmentality?’. Those authors reviewed two theories of risk, considering how each might contribute to understanding ‘new terrorism’. Inspired by ‘Which thesis?’ we review, contrast and compare three key theoretical contributions relevant to penology, criminology and border control: Stump’s ‘crimmigration’ thesis, Bosworth and Guild’s adaptation of the ‘new penology’ perspective, and Krasmann’s critique of Jakobs’ ‘enemy penology’ thesis. The article consolidates these important theoretical strands into one critical discussion, highlighting the growing relevance of the pre-crime literature to the study of borders, and signposting potential theoretical developments within border criminology that build on these foundations.
In this article, I will analyse how the Italian reception system has been transformed after the ‘refugee crisis’, showing how the change cannot be reduced to a mere expansion of the reception capacity. I will do this by tracing a genealogy of the Italian reception system and highlighting its main features before and after the ‘refugee crisis’. My hypothesis is that the ‘refugee crisis’ and the sense of emergency it created has stimulated the emergence of distinct segments within the Italian reception system functioning according to radically different philosophies and objectives. This, in addition to increasing the overall lack of consistency of the system, is having a profound impact on the rights of asylum seekers, greatly increasing the risk of their spatial and social segregation within Italian society.
Over the last twenty-five years, immigration detention policies and practices have proliferated around the globe. We look at four liberal democratic countries with the largest immigration detention systems—Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and identify components of an immigration detention policy ‘package’ as well as historical parallels in the early adoption of detention in these countries. This ‘Anglo model’ of detention is based on three main features: (1) the existence of indefinite and/or mandatory immigration detention policies; (2) the use of private security actors and infrastructure; and (3) the use of creative legal geographies in order to interdict and detain people offshore. Past scholarship on detention has focused on single national case studies or assumed the leadership of the USA as the primary innovator in the field. Our paper establishes the empirical and theoretical grounds for considering these countries as a group and suggests a more complex process of policy adoption among them. Identifying an Anglo model of detention lays the critical groundwork for understanding the expansion of immigration detention and the transnational diffusion of detention policies among these countries, as well as where and how countervailing pressures to detention might form.
From Mexico to the Bahamas, Mauritania to Lebanon, Turkey to Saudi Arabia, South Africa to Indonesia, Malaysia to Thailand, immigration-related detention has become an established policy apparatus that counts on dedicated facilities and burgeoning institutional bureaucracies. Until relatively recently, however, detention appears to have been largely an ad hoc tool, employed mainly by wealthy states in exigent circumstances. This paper uses concepts from diffusion theory to detail the history of key policy events in several important immigration destination countries that led to the spreading of detention practices during the last 30 years and assesses some of the motives that appear to have encouraged this phenomenon. The paper also endeavors to place the United States at the center of this story because its policy decisions appear to have played an important role in encouraging the process of policy innovation, imitation, and imposition that has helped give rise to today's global immigration detention phenomenon. Nevertheless, many US offshore practices have not received nearly the same attention as those of other important destination countries. More broadly, in telling this story, this paper seeks to flesh out some of the larger policy implications of the externalization of immigration control regimes. Just as offshore interdiction and detention schemes raise important questions about custody, accountability, and sovereignty, they should also spur questions over where responsibility for the wellbeing of migrants begins and ends.
This article analyses from a socio-legal point of view how the European Union Agenda on Migration is reshaping the Common European Asylum System by focusing on the impact it has had on the reform of the Italian reception system. After a preliminary examination of the European Union standards on reception, this article focuses on the European Union Agenda on Migration and shows that its main aim is to stimulate frontline Member States to reform their border control and reception practices by strengthening powers for the surveillance and detention of asylum-seekers. It then explores the Italian case, analysing how the hotspot approach has been implemented in practice and the influence it is having in pushing the Italian reception system from a policy model driven - albeit with a certain degree of ambiguity - by humanitarian concerns, to a model where security and border control priorities prevail. Finally, it concludes by describing some of the main features of the social sorting apparatus which was created by the European Union Agenda on Migration for discriminating between asylum-seekers in clear need of protection who can be relocated to other Member States, and others who should be trapped in the reception systems of frontline Member States.
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 subject to processes of differentiation and exclusion simply by virtue of their citizenship, I suggest, basic values of due process, fairness and equality of treatment and outcome, are drawn into question. As a consequence, justice itself is transformed.
This article deals with the modes of (contested) control that are at play at the Mediterranean frontier for containing, dividing and discipling unruly mobility. Building on ethnographic research conducted on the island of Lesvos and of Lampedusa, it focuses on the implementation and the functioning of the Hotspot System in Greece and in Italy, analysing beyond the fences of detention centres and by looking at the broader logistics of channels, infrastructures and governmental measures deployed for regaining control over migration movements. The article argues that more than control in terms of surveillance and tracking, the Hotspot System contributes to enforce forms of containment through mobility that consists in controlling migration by obstructing, decelerating and troubling migrants’ geographies – more than in fully blocking them. The article takes into account migrants’ refusals of being fingerprinted, showing how migrants radically unsettle the association between seeking refuge and lack of choice, enacting their right to choose where to go and claim asylum.
Penal power at the border relies on coercive tools such as expulsion, eviction, criminalization, and penalization to respond to mass mobility, which is perceived to be a social threat rather than a political expression of rights. By deploying its primal power, its material and symbolic violence invested in criminal justice, the state taps into unparalleled capacity to impose meaning on others, backed by the moral weight of censure and sanction. The criminalization and penalization of migrants are effective precisely because they bring moral weight to this sorting process, separating the worthy from the wrongdoer. This article develops conceptual tools to understand the structural and communicative capacities of penal power to reconstitute the nation state, to reset the national frame of reference, and reassert the state’s dominion over it.
The aim of this article is to offer an overview of how the “refugee crisis” has been discursively constructed in political and media discourses in Italy, focusing on how securitarian discourses are intertwined with other discourses, in particular, with humanitarian discourses. To this purpose, I offer an overview of how the refugee crisis has been represented by the Italian press and I examine the speech that Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi posted on his Facebook page after delivering the speech at the Italian Parliament the day before the special summit of the European Council called by Donald Tusk in the aftermath of the drowning tragedy that occurred in the Mediterranean Sea on April 18, 2015.
Despite the popular impression of prisons and other carceral spaces as disconnected from broader social systems, they are traversed by various circulations that reach within and beyond their boundaries. This article opens a new analytical window onto this reality, developing the concept of ‘circuits’ to critically enquire into the carceral. Drawing inspiration from Harvey (1982; 1985), the article makes circuits do fresh work, teasing apart the emerging carceral landscape to provide a new critical epistemology for carceral geographies. In so doing, a meta-institutional agenda for critical carceral geography is derived, and possible ways to short-circuit carceral systems are revealed.
Courts and commentators have long assumed, without significant analysis, that immigration detention is a form of civil confinement merely because the immigration proceedings of which it is part are deemed civil. This Article challenges that deeply held assumption. It harnesses the U.S. Supreme Court's instruction that detention's civil or penal character turns on legislative intent and, buttressed by theoretical understandings of punishment, contends that immigration detention - apart from the deportation that often results - itself constitutes penal incarceration. In particular, legislation enacted over roughly fifteen years in the 1980s and 1990s indicates a palpable desire to wield immigration detention as a tool in fighting the nation's burgeoning war on drugs by penalizing and stigmatizing criminal behavior. Indeed, the modern immigration detention system has accomplished the U.S. Congress's punitive goal: Immigration detention is a severely unpleasant experience and immigration detainees are viewed as dangerous. In order to remain true to the Court's guidance to draw formal boundaries between civil and penal confinement, the current immigration detention regime should be conceptualized as punishment. This Article contends that the constitutional limitations imposed by criminal procedure are ill-equipped to address immigration detention. Instead, policymakers should learn from the nations failed experience with mass penal incarceration - and step back from immigration detention's punitive origins to create a truly civil immigration detention system.
Just a decade ago security had little claim to criminological attention. Today a combination of disciplinary paradigm shifts, policy changes, and world political events have pushed security to the forefront of the criminological agenda. Distinctions between public safety and private protection, policing and security services, national and international security are being eroded. Post-9/11 the pursuit of security has been hotly debated not least because countering terrorism raises the stakes and licenses extraordinary measures. Security has become a central plank of public policy, a topical political issue, and lucrative focus of private venture but it is not without costs, problems, and paradoxes. As security governs our lives, governing security become a priority. This book provides a brief, authoritative introduction to the history of security from Hobbes to the present day and a timely guide to contemporary security politics and dilemmas. It argues that the pursuit of security poses a significant challenge for criminal justice practices and values. It defends security as public good and suggests a framework of principles by which it might better be governed. Engaging with major academic debates in criminology, law, international relations, politics, and sociology, this book stands at the vanguard of interdisciplinary writing on security.
The article brings to attention, and explores, the transformations of criminal justice related to the control of unwanted mobility, looking in particular at recent Norwegian developments. It maps a gradual emergence of a differentiated, two-tier approach to criminal justice and a more exclusionary penal culture directed at non-citizens. The article suggests that the absence of formal membership is the essential factor contributing towards shifting the nature of penal intervention from reintegration into the society towards deportation and territorial exclusion, and towards the development of a particular form of penality, termed hereby bordered penality. The lack of formal citizenship status also crucially affects the procedural and substantive standards of justice afforded to non-members. While these developments are not confined to Norway alone, they cast doubt on the non-punitive image that is widely attributed to Scandinavian countries, and present a set of conceptual, epistemological and normative challenges for criminal justice in a rapidly globalizing world.