Immigration Detention and Social Harm

Dr Michelle Peterie is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies and School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Peterie’s research investigates the impacts of social policies and practices on individual and collective wellbeing. Taking a person-centred approach – and in close collaboration with research participants and third-sector stakeholders – her work seeks to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, families and communities. Peterie is the author of Visiting Immigration Detention: Care and Cruelty in Australia’s Asylum Seeker Prisons (2022), the co-author of Compulsory Income Management in Australia and New Zealand: More Harm than Good? (2022), and the co-editor of Emotions in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2019). She has been invited to give expert evidence to the Australian Senate, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Crown Solicitor, and her research has received national media attention.

This riveting, timely collection of essays critically documents and exposes the wholly negative consequences of immigration detention around the world, precisely as detention is increasingly centred in national and international immigration and border enforcement strategies. Using an original lens of ‘social’ harm, contributors shift public and scholarly attention to how the impacts of detention reverberate far beyond the place and time of detention. Through a variety of rich, well-researched case studies, this book powerfully illustrates that not only does detention fail to achieve policymakers’ stated goals, but it also causes long-lasting, painful, unnecessary harms to families, communities, economies, and societies.Nancy Hiemstra, Associate Professor at Stony Brook University, USThis book delivers a powerful message as it guides the reader through often overlooked dimensions of immigration detention. It demonstrates how the formulation and delivery of this practice harms not only those detained, their family and friends but society more broadly. In the introduction Michelle Peterie establishes the value of social harm as the conceptual frame of analysis. Through this lens the authors collectively destabilise moral and ethical justifications typically used to sustain the practice and expose the limits of political interest. I highly recommend this important work to scholars and students across disciplinary areas such as sociology, politics, criminology, policy making and law, as well as more general readers seeking to better understand this complex topic.Melissa Bull, Professor Queensland University of Technology, Australia

• Introduction: The Reverberating Harms of Immigration DetentionMichelle PeteriePart 1: Human Costs1. “If I Talk About It, I Start Crying”: Children's Responses to Parental Immigration Imprisonment in the USCaitlin Patler, Gabriela Gonzalez, Monica Cardenas Guzman and Guillermo Paez Gallardo2. Detention in the Community: Complex Ripple Effects on Young Adults in the USJoanna Dreby and Tsveta Dobreva3. Bonds Strengthened, Strained, and Severed: The Effects of US Immigration Detention on Family CohesionMirian G. Martinez-Aranda and Tamara Black4. Immigration Detention and UK FamiliesMelanie Griffiths and Candice Morgan-Glendinning5. Moral Injury in Australian Immigration DetentionMichelle Peterie6. UK Immigration Detention, Exhaustion and the Politics of CareAlexandra Hall7. Australian Immigration Detention and its Impact on Healthcare Workers and the Australian Healthcare CommunityRyan Essex and Erika KalocsányiováPart 2: Societal Consequences8. Gender, Violence and Regimes of Vulnerability in Immigration Detention: A Transnational AnalysisFrancesca Esposito and Mary Bosworth9. Immigration Detention as Racialised Wealth ExtractionEmily Ryo and Christopher Levesque10. Immunised and Indifferent to Indefinite Incarceration: The Corrosive Effect of Immigration Detention Laws on OfficialdomPeter Billings11. Executive Control Over Immigration Detention Policy and Practice in AustraliaAmy Nethery and Cassandra Le GoodPart 3: Ending The Harm12. Accessing Information on Immigration Detention in Canada: Towards Carceral Transparency to Reduce Social HarmSarah Turnbull and Joao Velloso13. Advancing Abolitionism: Why the Immigration Detention Industry Must EndVictoria Canning