All-foreign prisons in the United States, England and Wales, and Norway: Related logics and local expressions
| Author | Robert Hallam Tuck,Dorina Damsa,Elizabeth Kullman |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221116092 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
All-foreign prisons in the
United States, England and
Wales, and Norway: Related
logics and local expressions
Robert Hallam Tuck
University of Oxford, UK
Dorina Damsa
University of Oslo, Norway
Elizabeth Kullman
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
Norway, England and Wales, and the USA are among a small number of affluent Western
countries to establish ‘all-foreign’prisons in response to public concerns about the
growing threat of foreign-national prisoners. Drawing on collaborative analysis of empir-
ical data collected at all-foreign prisons in these three countries, this article traces the
conditions in which all-foreign prisons emerged, the position and function of all-foreign
prisons in specific national systems of criminal justice and immigration control, and the
operation of all-foreign prisons within each context. The article points to a shared logic,
while drawing attention to the local expressions of bordered penality.
Keywords
bordered penality, crimmigration prison, foreign nationals, gender, penal populism, racialization,
welfare chauvinism
Corresponding author:
Robert Hallam Tuck, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, Centre for Criminology, Oxford, UK.
Email: hallam.tuck@crim.ox.ac.uk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2022, Vol. 26(4) 557–579
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/13624806221116092
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Introduction
At the turn of the 21st century, Norway, England and Wales, and the USA (hereafter
United States) each established all-foreign prisons in response to public concerns
about the growing threat of foreign-national prisoners. In the United States, the
Federal Bureau of Prisons began procurement for the first two privately contracted, all-
foreign ‘criminal alien requirement’(CAR) prisons in 1999 (Department of Justice
Office of the Inspector General [DOJ], 2016). At its peak in 2016, the Bureau of
Prisons operated 15 of these facilities, housing roughly 22,600 sentenced prisoners
(DOJ, 2016). A similar system was established in England and Wales in 2006, as part
of the ‘hubs and spokes’policy (Kaufman, 2013), which deliberately segregated foreign-
national citizenss into specific prisons with a designated immigration presence. In 2012,
the Norwegian Department of Justice’s Correctional Service announced that the
Kongsvinger prison facility would become the country’sfirst dedicated all-foreign facil-
ity (Kriminalomsorgsdirektoratet, Letter 12/7475, 2012).
This integration of punishment and migration control is a shared feature of three
national penal systems otherwise thought to exemplify different ends of the spectrum
of criminal justice. Whereas Norway is considered an exemplar of ‘Scandinavian excep-
tionalism’, the United States and England and Wales are said to exemplify ‘Anglophone
penal excess’(Pratt, 2008; Pratt and Eriksson, 2013). Yet, the growth of research on the
entanglement of criminal law and immigration control ( García Hernández, 2013; Stumpf,
2006) has led scholars to question this characterization of relative penal excess and mod-
eration (Aas, 2014; Barker, 2013, 2018; Franko, 2020). The emergence of all-foreign
prisons in the United States (Bureau of Prisons, 1999; Kaufman, 2019), Norway
(Ugelvik and Damsa, 2018; Ugelvik, 2013, 2017) and England and Wales (Kaufman,
2015; Singh Bhui, 2008; Warr, 2016) has given rise to a growing body of research
that has charted how the goal of deportation has been integrated into the prison setting.
Following Katja Franko’s (2020: 87) call to investigate the ‘numerous national varia-
tions of bordered penality and crimmigration control’, in this article, we draw on original
empirical research to develop a comparative analysis of all-foreign prisons in the United
States, England and Wales, and Norway. Our analysis focuses on three areas of compari-
son: the conditions in which all-foreign prisons emerged, their position and function of in
specific national systems of criminal justice and immigration control, and their operation
within each context. The intention of our analysis is not to chart policy transfer or to claim
specific causal factors led to penal convergence or divergence (Jones and Newburn,
2008), but rather to develop a more nuanced understanding of the emergence of what
is variously called ‘crimmigration’(Stumpf, 2006), ‘bordered penality’(Aas, 2014;
Franko, 2020) or ‘penal nationalism’(Barker, 2018; Barker and Smith, 2021). This ana-
lysis may then help to nuance claims about the global, unilinear trend towards the mixing
and intensification of criminal justice and migration control.
Our findings highlight the disjuncture between bordered penality in rhetoric and prac-
tice. In response to anxieties about ‘foreign criminals’(BBC News, 2006a; Solheim,
2014) or ‘criminal aliens’(United States Senate, 1995), each country shifted the focus
of penal intervention from moral censure towards determining ‘who has the right to be
here’(Aas, 2014: 539). Yet the material practice of segregated punishment varies
558 Theoretical Criminology 26(4)
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