Health Policy and Racial Capitalism in British Detention Centres

In 2014, the then Home Secretary of the UK, Theresa May, commissioned a review on the policies and operating procedures that impact the welfare of immigrant detainees. Over the following year, Stephen Shaw, a senior civil servant, visited immigration removal centres, pre-departure accommodations, short-term holding facilities, and prisons to produce a landmark report on detention. Close-reading Shaw's Review into the Welfare in Detention of Vulnerable Persons (2016) as a cultural artefact, this Element argues that the British government's health policies shape the racialized asylum-seeker's access to healthcare, effectively dictating who is permitted to live well, survive, or die, and revealing care itself as a technology of state power. Situating Britain's detention industrial complex within the intersecting frameworks of racial capitalism, racialization, bio/necropolitics, and Critical Medical Humanities, it demonstrates how conditional access to healthcare functions as a mechanism of governance, through which vulnerability, debility, and slow death are differentially distributed.