A leading organizer of the global effort to promote alternatives to immigration detention explores advocacy strategies for spurring detention reforms and the rationale behind the alternatives campaign. […]
United Kingdom
Can Inspection Produce Meaningful Change in Immigration Detention?
In this GDP Working Paper, an inspector from the UK Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons discusses tensions between pushing for short-term progress in the treatment of immigration detainees and long-term reforms. The HMIP focuses on treatment and conditions, not challenging the system, even if immigration detention arguably lacks legitimacy in a way that criminal imprisonment does not. What amounts to “effective” inspection and can inspection promote meaningful change?
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There and Back Again: On the Diffusion of Immigration Detention
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. […]
How and Why Immigration Detention Crossed the Globe
This paper details the history of key policy events in various countries that led to the global diffusion of detention practices during the last 30 years and assesses some of the motives that appear to have encouraged this phenomenon. In telling this story, this paper seeks to flesh out some of the larger policy implications […]
United Kingdom Home Office – Access to Information Requests, 23.04.2013 & 30.04.2013
The UK Home Office’s official responses to information requests submitted by the Global Detention Project and Access Info Europe in 2013 as part of a joint project to map access to migration-related detention data in several dozen countries in Europe and North America. The results of the investigation were reported in the joint publication, “The […]
