Abstract

Since the turn of the century, immigration detention has garnered increased attention among scholars across a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, geography, psychology, medicine, law and sociology. It is all the more surprising then, that until recently it has rarely been the subject of criminological scrutiny. Although, as this handbook attests, there is these days a burgeoning field of border studies within criminology (see McCulloch and Pickering 2012; Aas and Bosworth 2013; Guia et al. 2013), much of the work is very recent. If we narrow the lens further to criminological accounts of immigration detention, there are only a handful of texts, few of which contain any detail about the lived experience of this form of confinement (see, for example, Welch 2002; Pratt, 2005; Leerkes and Broeders 2010; Grewcock 2011; Bosworth 2012; 2013). Administrative rather than penal (Hernandez 2008), immigration detention seems to have been eclipsed by the prison, notwithstanding the long-standing ties between them (Simon 1998; Bosworth and Kaufman 2011; Kaufman and Bosworth 2013).