Good afternoon, everyone. Just wanted to say thanks again to the organisers of the workshop.
I know a lot of people have gotten a lot of work to make this happen, so thank you to everyone.
Today I am presenting a paper that comes out of a larger research project in the UK involving the lived experiences of immigration detainees.
So I'm going to talk about this paper focuses on the themes of waiting and uncertainty in immigration detention.
And my argument in this paper is that the material and structural conditions of detention really shape how detainees do time,
and it exacerbates the difficult aspects of waiting for decisions that have the potential to really fundamentally alter detainees life courses.
So my approach, I'm a qualitative researcher, so quite different from the sort of approach Ben has just talked about.
So I'm really interested in detainees narratives and using these narratives as a way to kind of really understand
how people experience the day to day aspects of being detained and how they understand their confinement.
So in talking to people who are in detention, themes of waiting and the kind of unique temporal aspects of their confinement have important,
effective impacts on how they do time and how they cope with the sort of uncertainty of their confinement.
So before I start, I just want to tell you a bit about the broader research project and where I'm sort of situated at Oxford.
So I'm part of a research team that's led by Dr. Mary Bosworth, and I'm under her research grant that's funded by the European Research Council.
So the project subjected identity and penal power of incarceration in a global age really looks at issues of border control,
the criminal criminalisation of mobility, and the ways in which criminal justice extends out to areas that we're not normally.
Maybe part of criminal justice, like immigration and sort of the services of border control.
So the kind of main goals of the projects are to develop new methodological and
intellectual tools to help understand the global and transnational reach of penal power,
and also to revitalise the literature on subjectivity and identity and criminology.
So our little small research team really interested in notions of gender, of race, of nationality, of language,
and how these impact on people's understandings of sort of where they belong in the world and also in sort of host nations,
sort of the ways in which those who've been themselves native or of the nation sort of respond to people that are on the move globally.
So some of the broader research questions we're addressing with each project is this relationship between penal power and national identity,
and again, how this relationship is gendered, racialized. And really looking at the experiences and views of those who are subjected to penal
power and what this tells us about the limits and nature of the state in a global age.
So just so that the presentation makes maybe a bit of sense.
I just want to tell you a little bit about what immigration detention is and what it looks like in the UK.
So at present we have 11 immigration removal centres and there's a combined capacity to detain just over 4000 people.
The maps are shows where they are and they're really clustered in the south of England and mostly around airports in order to facilitate removal.
In 2013, there just over 30,000 people that went into detention at some point in the year and maybe perhaps of interest to this group.
The top nationalities are Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Nigeria.
So people who are detained in the UK are really often coming from Britain's former colonies.
So we really do see this relationship between people's movement and the British Empire and Empire building in the past.
So who are the people that are detained in in the UK?
There's really a mix of different kinds of people.
So there's asylum seekers and this includes people that have failed claims or the claims and process as part of the UK's fast track asylum process.
We also have foreign national ex-prisoners. So these people have completed the prison portion of their sentence and are facing deportation.
We also have visa overstayers. We have foreign nationals that have visa problems.
So in my research in this past year, I've met a lot of students whose colleges close down.
They have no visa. They end up in detention. So there's really a range of people.
And then we also have undocumented migrants, these people coming on a lorry from France, and they're detained with no identity.
Our sorry documents, I guess we should say. And why are these people being detained in immigration detention?
And I guess are the interest here is that it's not under sort of criminal law power, it's actually under administrative power.
So there's a bunch of different reasons why people are detained. And this can be to determine identity.
It can to be prevent people from absconding while their cases are being processed.
And it can also be to sort of hold people in place in order to facilitate removal.
So the paper that I presenting draws on ethnographic data that's collected.
Again, as I said, part of a project project in the UK. And this involves both the in detention and post detention experiences of migrants.
So I spent about the last year at four different detention facilities in the UK.
And also I've been talking to people that I met in detention who have either been released into the UK or who have been removed or deported.
And the methods I've used are persistent observation interviews, focus groups.
I do a survey, but I won't talk about that here.
So in speaking to people who are detained, I talked a lot about how they pass their time and how they cope with waiting.
So sort of spending time in the detention centre,
you really realise that people are kind of waiting for things to happen, a variety of things to happen.
So that's hence the sort of theme of this papers is on Waiting.
And one thing I think for this crowd, people interested in law, so detainees aren't being punished in the traditional sense of sort of criminal law,
power and importantly, decisions to detain aren't subject to any kind of automatic judicial review.
So one of the interesting and troubling things about immigration detention is that detainees are confined,
but they have fewer mechanisms of oversight and really lesser legal standards than
would be available had they been sort of charged or something under the criminal law.
So that's going to quickly show you a couple of photos of the field work sites.
This is Camp Field House. It's actually located just ten miles north of Oxford.
So I spent about 51 days there.
You also heard this is the primary detention centre for women.
Cronenberg This is built to what we call in the UK a category B, there's an architecture, so it's about a medium security prison.
It's quite high security level. This is mostly for men.
There's a small women's unit and Dover, which is run by the prison service, and it is located with a lovely view of France on a clear day.
It's on top of a hill. It's in an old fort that goes back to think Napoleonic times.
It's a really bizarre sort of space. But yeah, it's one of the defining features of immigration is that it's indeterminate.
There's no statutory constraint on the length of time that someone can be detained.
Now the UK opted out of the European Union Returns Directive, which limited the duration of detention to a total maximum of 18 months.
So for those who are detained in the UK, their detention is really uncertain.
It's unpredictable. It may last a few hours, it may not last a few days.
It could be weeks, it could be months. And for some people it's years.
So this lived experience of detention really becomes one about waiting.
It's about waiting. Both sides waiting to know both when and then how detention will end.
So is it going to involve someone's release into the community, perhaps with a form of status?
Or is it going to result in expulsion so being forced onto a plane or eventually agreeing to go back?
So the denial of liberty and the conditions of detainees confinement do present additional difficulties for them.
So they have to contend with significant limits to their agency while they await decisions of a number of different actors.
And this includes their immigration caseworkers, judges, detention, custody officers, solicitors, and also sort of advocates.
They may be working in their favour. So this concept of waiting is interesting, I think, because it's an exercise of power.
It's one that manipulates others time. And it's also one way that people experience the effects of power.
So although everyone waits and we all wait on a daily basis for a variety of things, for immigration detainees,
the lived experience of waiting in custodial institutions that are sort of characterised by high levels of uncertainty,
stress and unpredictability is really challenging for these individuals and for scholars of punishment.
Like myself, this notion of doing time in immigration detention raises questions about affect,
about agency resistance, sort of how people cope with this kind of quasi penal space.
So waiting in detention is really contradictory, both emotionally and temporally and temporally.
So emotionally, it's highly anxiety provoking and stressful for most detainees, yet, because they're confined,
is also associated with monotony and boredom and the kind of day to day experience.
And in terms of time, the experience of waiting tends to mark how people do time in detention.
So every detainee's everyday lives tend to be organised around a variety of different bureaucratic and institutional time frames,
not of their choosing. So I just want to talk about three themes that emerged so far in this research in relation to the notion of waiting.
So the first is this idea of doing time in a very uncertain and indeterminate context.
Now, this experience of not knowing what's happening with one's life is really challenging for most of the detainees I spoke with.
But not everyone experienced sort of this waiting to know in the same way.
So a number of detainees made sense of their time in detention, visited the prison and the determinate nature of most criminal sentencing.
So one young man I talked to earlier about, he's a Nigerian man in an early twenties and talked about it in this quote,
as you can see, you know, he compares it to the prison.
So he says detention is more torturing than the prison because at least in the prison, you know how long you're going to be there.
But in detention, you know, he's got no idea.
So every day he's hoping that the next day is going to bring some kind of, you know,
end to his condition or at least some kind of news of what's happening next.
So interestingly, detainees I talked with also felt that this sort of notion,
this kind of enforced uncertainty was one way the British government achieved its objectives of getting rid of people.
So people kept in this state of unknowing and of uncertainty that eventually they would get tired of waiting and they'd just be like,
I just want to go home. I want this over with. And this is their nature of detention really affected how detainees did their time.
So some tribes try to impose a kind of order on their day. So one man I talked to, he described his sense of time in each day,
dictated by the hours in which the Home Office or his caseworker, the solicitor, when he might expect news.
So he'd be waiting sort of in the night for the morning.
So after 9 a.m., when Business Hour started, he wait to hear something.
If that didn't happen, he'd wait for after lunch. But nothing happened after lunch.
He'd know that. Well, it's 5:00. Everyone's gone home.
You have to wait again till the next morning. So this really shaped how his sort of he did his time, how the sense of time was experienced of him.
It was a very kind of sticky notion that it was slow and still and kind of being stuck.
So others described their experience of waiting as being constantly on edge.
So Henry Moloney, a man in his mid-thirties, you know, talked about this way as being,
you know, constantly waiting so he could sit in a cell and he might hear someone walking.
And you think, maybe that officer's coming to get me?
So it's constantly sort of you never really at peace because you think, well, what's going to happen next for you?
But that's what she you know, she was really hoping, actually, that someone would come to her and say, you know, you're free.
You're free to go. And she, you know, really anticipated that this could happen to her.
And she wanted to be one of those people who she saw that were being released and, you know, could experience that sense of elation and relief.
But unfortunately, she was actually removed to India. So she's here somewhere.
So the second thing I want to talk about is this notion of being stuck.
So immigration detention is supposed to be sort of one the person's last stop in their migration journey and the UK, you know,
and she has one renamed its detention centres removal centres to kind of imply this mobility that people are going to be held for very long,
that they're kind of, you know, moving out of the U.K. they're going to be gone.
But for a lot of people I talked to, they really, you know, told me about being stuck,
that detention is some kind of purgatory, a space of limbo, where they're forced to wait against their will.
So, again, earlier about this young man said before, you know, he really says that we're stuck in the middle.
He doesn't know. No one knows what's going to happen next. And for some people, it really can drive them crazy.
And a lot of people coped with detention through their faith.
So this woman, Mary Jane from Zimbabwe, you know, she said that her source of strength, strength was in God.
And she referred to detention as a form of mental torture, that she had experience and that without her faith, you know, she would go crazy.
And detainees also talked about the ability of the British government to how the government's
ability to dictate their time really impacted their sense of what was happening to them.
And especially for young men in particular, they felt like their lives were being wasted by detention.
They saw their sort of peer group, you know, maybe getting married, having jobs, going to university, and they're stuck in detention.
And for some of these young men who have gone prison before, they basically spent some of them years in this kind of limbo situation.
And they really view this as punitive and unfair. Now, detention is only one place that people wait.
You know, immigration detention is sort of, I guess, the most extreme example of how people are regulated in terms of immigration control.
A lot of people are in the community.
But for some people I've talked to that, you know, they might you might think that being in the community is preferable to detention.
For some, it presents challenges that detention doesn't, at least in detention.
You know, some are to sleep. You've got food three meals a day, and then you're in the community.
Many people face destitution. They're not allowed to work.
They don't get benefits. They live off £35 a week.
Some of them some people have no source of income at all.
So one young man, Hussein, from Pakistan, he told me that, you know, in detention, they had everything.
They got food, shelter, activities, yet no freedom. Yet in the community, they have freedom, but nothing else.
Now, Mira, in this quote here, she emailed to say what was happy with her.
And she's just very frustrated because she's not allowed to work.
She's not allowed to do anything for her.
This felt like a real indignity and that the Home Office in this case is making her suffer at every possible way.
So importantly, the experience of waiting doesn't sort of end in detention.
It often follows many people into the community where they might have to wait for months and even years.
So this last theme I want to talk about is this notion of playing the waiting game.
So if we think about waiting, we don't want to think about, you know, equating it with passivity.
So, you know, there's a lot of really interesting ways that the detainees I talked to tried to exert some kind of control over their situations.
For some, they agreed to return to their country of origin as a way to kind of put the prolonged experience of waiting to an end.
Others I spoke with continually chased up their immigration caseworkers every day,
sending faxes, making calls and attempt to kind of speed the process along.
A few others took drastic measures. So one man I talked to,
he was really in this limbo position who the government would act to send it back to Ethiopia when asked to release him from detention.
And he became extremely frustrated. And I did see his mental health deteriorate over time.
And he took to calling the police to report a kidnapping as a way to try to make something happen.
In this case, Henry, who I gave a quote from before he had spent ten years in the U.K. and he'd been denied asylum.
He'd exhausted all his options.
And his strategy actually was just to wait patiently because he saw trying to make the Home Office make a decision would be provoking them.
And he thought it would be strategically better just to wait and see what happens.
And in his case, actually, he did get eventually released on something called temporary mission.
So it kind of worked out for him in the end.
Other people and most of these were ex-prisoners who were perhaps more experience with waiting and also often had longer,
stronger ties to the community. Also, you know, refer to detention as a waiting game.
Marco, who's a Portuguese citizen, you know, he said he's going to wait.
If it takes a year, he doesn't care. He's can wait for as long as it takes in order that when he does come out, his life is going to be sorted.
And I actually met Marco in another centre nine months later, so he had actually spent since I met him probably about ten,
10 to 11 months in detention and he was eventually bailed, but he still his case is not resolved.
Another young man, Michael, from Rwanda, he had come from prison and he, you know, for him,
he could wait because he was doing license, which means he was serving the community based portion of a sentence while he's in prison.
So for him, waiting was kind of okay because he became very frustrated trying to apply for bail and keep being denied.
So for he decided again strategically that, you know, if they're going to actually if they did let him out,
they're going to release him on really strict conditions and force him to live somewhere he doesn't want to live.
So for him, it was better just to wait and he continues to wait in detention.
So I think one of the interesting aspects of immigration detention is that the majority of detainees are compliant.
You know, they do sit sort of largely covered by and wait patiently for the Home Office to make decisions in their case.
And I think what's really interesting is the way in which waiting creates a new creates relations of domination and subordination.
So we can see waiting as one way that it's about being subordinated to the will of others.
And that's an exercise of power of.
So we can see the interactions of power here. It's not that detainees are powerless.
Detention doesn't pose significant constraints on their agency, their ability to change their circumstances.
But in the few examples I've given and hope to elaborate more on that in the paper is that there are different ways that people who are detained
can negotiate this weighting and really do so in some often some kind of creative ways as a way to sort of make sense of who they are,
where they are, and why they're being held.
So one thing I hope to work out a bit more in this paper is the notion of waiting in conditions of uncertainty and predictability
as being predictive of certain kinds of detained subjects who acquiesce to the dictates of the British government while they wait,
hoping for decisions in their favour. But I think if we think practically about it, if you have any other choice but to wait.
So and I've given a number of people cards.
If you're interested in any of the research on Borders for criminology, please visit our website.
We have a lot of publications, information about the different projects,
and a great blog that shares information about what we do at Oxford and our team.
So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, sir, for giving the time as well.
Thank you and good.