Conceptualizing detention Mobility, containment, bordering, and exclusion

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that detention can be conceptualized as a series of geographical processes, operating through these processes are contradictory sets of temporal and spatial logics that structure the seemingly paradoxical geographies underpinning detention.

Abstract: Detention is a pressing empirical, conceptual, and political issue. Detained populations, detention facilities, and industries have expanded globally. Detention is also a fundamentally geographical topic, yet largely overlooked by geographers. We argue that detention be conceptualized as a series of geographical processes. Operating through these processes are contradictory sets of temporal and spatial logics that structure the seemingly paradoxical geographies underpinning detention. These logics include containment and mobility, bordering and exclusion. We trace these logics through an emergent literature, synthesizing and analyzing important geographic themes in the field. We identify contributions by and new avenues of inquiry for geographers.

Summary

A. Introduction

• This paper emerged out of an urgent need for more critical research among geographers on im/migrant detention.
• In particular, the authors find paradoxical issues of containment and mobility, as well as bordering and exclusion built into national and transnational landscapes of detention.

B. Containment / mobility

• Discourse, laws or policies, and technologies of control-such as detention-together work, McDowell and Wonders (2009) argue, as global disciplinary strategies attempting to differentially shape migrant mobility.
• Underlying processes of detention is the juxtaposition of containment and mobility.
• Only through becoming knowable can citizens prove their innocence.
• Even as detention contains migrant bodies, it simultaneously makes those same bodies more mobile in controlled ways through dispersal, transfers, and deportation.
• Dispersing migrants and transferring them among detention facilities separates migrants from community, family, and legal support while working to conceal their identities (Mountz, Forthcoming) .

Containment of individual bodies remains intricately intertwined with mobile forces

• The juxtaposition of mobility and containment is a logic that underscores many of the contradictory behaviors detention exhibits: fixing identities while creating new ones, confining bodies while moving them around, or isolating individuals while mobilizing their collective, global threat.
• Yet while detention may be constructed out of conflicting logics, these manifest distinctly at different sites.
• The geography of detention shapes how its paradoxical underpinnings take form and reveals the need for more research on detention processes and practices.

C. Bordering / exclusion

• Detention centers are a powerful, physical manifestation of exclusionary state practices, which work not only to contain mobility, but also to reconfigure and relocate national borders.
• These processes of ordering bodies construct categories of illegality via exclusion, just as remote locations and legal ambiguities are themselves borders that exclude migrants from the wider society (Bashford and Strange, 2002; Conlon, 2010) .
• The seemingly regional border becomes not only subnationally enforced, but also individually affixed.
• While European Union border enforcement appeared to move border enforcement and exclusion of migrants away from the national scale, processes of detention truly externalize borders beyond national territories and offshore.
• Detention fuses overlapping scales and spaces of border enforcement, introducing exclusionary practices that become affixed to bodies, locales, and even regions.

D. Conclusions and directions for future research

• The authors have focused on migrant detention as an area of study partly because it provides a unique lens through which to study distinct and specific spatial and temporal logics -temporary and indefinite, remoteness and proximity, internalizing and externalizing borders.
• Nation-states and security industries deploy anticipatory temporal logics as rationales for prevention and deterrence, which take spatial form in the fortification of border walls, deployment of mobile interdiction forces, and detention centers.
• Imprisonment and detention involve similar processes of racialized entrapment, together generate economic vulnerability (and gain), and increasingly share sturdy legal and discursive practices of racialized criminalization.
• Immigrant detention offers a particular view into the global prison regime, not because of its size in comparison to mass incarceration in the United States or the volume of international migration, but because of how it so readily illustrates new forms of state-building and shifting sovereignty, and so patently draws attention to the regulation of labor power.
• A second dimension of detention that a feminist analysis can better detail concerns the shifting and multiple relations between public and private.

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Citation for published item:
Mountz, A. and Coddington, K. and Loyd, J. and Catania, R. T. (2012) 'Conceptualizing detention : mobility,
containment, bordering, and exclusion.', Progress in human geography., 37 (4). pp. 522-541.
Further information on publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132512460903
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Mountz, A. and Coddington, K. and Loyd, J. and Catania, R. T. (2012) 'Conceptualizing detention : mobility,
containment, bordering, and exclusion.', Progress in human geography., 37 (4). pp. 522-541. Copyright
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Conceptualizing detention: mobility, containment, bordering, and exclusion
A. Introduction
This paper emerged out of an urgent need for more critical research among
geographers on im/migrant detention. The practices, processes, systems, population
movements, and enforcement industries driving dramatic growth in detention globally in
recent years raise important questions that are fundamentally geographic in nature,
empirically and conceptually. Yet, geographers have been slow to conduct this research.
As Lauren Martin and Matthew Mitchelson note (2009: 459), “Processes of detention and
confinement have been relatively neglected by geographers. This is surprising because
these social practices of immobilization are fundamentally reliant on spatial tactics, or the
use of space to control people, objects, and their movement.” Here, we detail an empirically
and conceptually driven rationale for our advocacy of more geographic research on
detention and discuss the specific spatial tactics embedded in landscapes of detention. We
offer a review of recent literature on detention within and beyond the discipline of
geography, and an analysis of this literature that highlights the particular time-space logics
that structure the detention of migrants, immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers across

national contexts. As such, we understand this literature to be part of the emerging,
interdisciplinary field of detention studies.
i
We aim for this intervention to synthesize and
analyze recent literature in this field, thereby contributing to existing knowledge and
simultaneously spurring additional research among geographers on detention.
There is a pressing and clear empirical rationale for more research on migrant
detention. During 2009 in the United States alone, approximately 380,000 people spent
time in the vast and continuously-expanding migrant detention system. This system
consisted of approximately 350 facilities operating at an annual cost of more than $1.7US
billion (Detention Watch Network, 2011). The United Kingdom, too, has expanded its use
of migrant detention in the form of “Asylum Screening Units” associated with entry at
airports and “Removal Centres,” with over 6.5 billion pounds spent on transfers among
facilities during fiscal year 2004-2005 (Hansard, 2005, 2006; cited in Gill, 2009a: 3).
Across the European Union, detention facilities have similarly proliferated and now number
in the hundreds (Schuster, Forthcoming). There, lengthened stays are due, inadvertently, if
in part, to a Return Directive adapted by the European Parliament in 2008 that allowed
member states to detain migrants for up to eighteen months (Karlsson, 2010). Australia has
similarly intensified detention practices on and offshore (Briskman et al., 2009; Taylor,
2009). The Australian detention regime has especially targeted asylum-seekers who arrive

without a visa, who, according to current law, face mandatory detention upon arrival. As of
20 May 2011, there were 6,729 people detained on Australian mainland or offshore
territory (Department of Immigration & Citizenship, 2011).
Both Australia and the European Union have invested heavily offshore and
spearheaded bilateral arrangements with source and transit countries to facilitate the
repatriation of potential asylum seekers intercepted en route (Betts, 2004). These returns
have, in turn, prompted the growth of detention structures along transnational routes
traveled by migrants in their journeys through northern Africa, eastern Europe, Indonesia,
and Central America to countries where they hope to make asylum claims (see Global
Detention Project, 2011). A recent, comprehensive study of detention facilities funded by
Australia in Indonesia, for example, estimates some 2000 asylum-seekers that are held in
Indonesia after being intercepted en route to Australia to make claims (Taylor, 2009: 4).
Of course, detention systems do not operate in isolation, but rather, are intensified
by the growth of related global industries and policies that become enmeshed in distinct
geopolitical landscapes. As one example, detention and deportation are interlocking
industries: as use of one intensifies, so too does the other. Deportations from several
immigrant-receiving countries peaked during the last few years, with the highest rates of
deportation (among those countries believed to release reasonably accurate statistical data)

from the United States, South Africa, Greece, the United Kingdom, and Libya (Chamie and
Mirkin, 2010). During the fiscal year ending in September 2010, the United States deported
over 392,000 people, a record high (Washington Post, 2010).
Other types of immigration enforcement have expanded as well, with the array of
authorities that undertake enforcement proliferating. These expansions occur either through
the involvement of local police (as in the United States), cooperation of national authorities
in transit countries (as in Indonesia and Libya), or involvement of private third parties who
run detention facilities and broker arrangements between states, as in the case of the
International Organization for Migration operating on behalf of Australia on Nauru and in
Indonesia (Ashutosh and Mountz, 2011). Scholars have argued that the privatization of
industries associated with detention has increased the numbers of migrants in detention
both by creating additional capacity (cells or “bedspace” in industry parlance) at a time
when privatization still signals efficiency and cost-saving, and by entrenching an economic
motive for each contract filled (Davis, 2003; Flynn and Cannon, 2009; Sudbury, 2005).
Beyond the considerable, even overwhelming, empirical evidence suggesting
substantial and rapid growth in detention, lie equally compelling conceptual reasons why
geographers need to pay more attention to detention practices and processes. In fact, we
argue that detention can be conceptualized as a series of processes; and that operating

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. 

Q2. What are the future works in this paper?

The authors have focused on migrant detention as an area of study partly because it provides a unique lens through which to study distinct and specific spatial and temporal logics – borders. As this paper suggests, the question of whose security is at stake looks quite different from the perspective of people seeking safety and opportunity in the face of persecution and dispossession. But as Simon ’ s piece suggests, there are longer histories of war-making and colonialism that need to be traced in order to better understand the spatial logics of security underpinning imperialism and capitalism. This thesis has been pursued less explicitly ( but see McDowell and Wonders [ 2009 ] and Varsanyi [ 2008 ] for suggestive work ). 

Q3. What are the main characteristics of detention centers?

Detention centers are a powerful, physical manifestation of exclusionary statepractices, which work not only to contain mobility, but also to reconfigure and relocate national borders. 

Q4. What is the meaning of detention centers?

Practices of detention reify borders between citizens and non-citizens, producing identities of legality and illegality, alien and non-alien. 

Q5. What does Andrijasevic say about the detention of migrants?

Andrijasevic (2009: 159) contends, however, that as external processing centers do not yet exist for the European Union, the detention and expulsion of migrants “constitutes a retraction of the right to asylum rather than its externalization” and thus, the entrenchment of European Union borders. 

Q6. What is the main idea of Van Houtum’s paper?

Van Houtum (2010) demonstrates how the European Union’s global border regimemore broadly, and detention practices more specifically, rely upon logics of exclusion that determine who can travel freely and who must be deterred or detained. 

Q7. What is the main idea of Coutin’s research?

Coutin’s (2010: 205) research onmigrants as aliens, even for individuals who were permanent residents and considered themselves quasi citizens. 

Q8. What is the only ‘secure’ outcome of detention policies?

As recent research in detention studies suggests, the only ‘secure’ outcome of these policies is the unparalleled global expansion of migrant detention. 

Q9. What is the common use of solitary confinement in the United States and Australia?

In the United States and Australia, extended periods of solitary confinement are used to compel individuals to agree to deportation (Bashford and Strange, 2002; Macklin, 2003). 

Q10. What does Alberti and McNevin (2010) reveal about the European Union’s border?

Migrants released from detention in Greece with a ‘white paper’ –an order to apply for asylum and leave Greece within 30 days– find themselves marked bodies within in a “pattern of circularity” and illegality upon their expulsion to Greece (Alberti, 2010: 143). 

Q11. What is the second dimension of detention that a feminist analysis can better detail?

A second dimension of detention that a feminist analysis can better detail concernsthe shifting and multiple relations between public and private. 

Q12. What does the article say about the migration and border enforcement in Italy?

Italy has been particularly vigorous in its attempts to move border enforcement and migration control beyond its sovereign soil, often through bilateral agreements.