Bordered penality in the Netherlands: The experiences of foreign national prisoners and prison officers in a crimmigration prison
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Jelmer Brouwer |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520915825 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Bordered penality in
the Netherlands:
The experiences of
foreign national prisoners
and prison officers in a
crimmigration prison
Jelmer Brouwer
Leiden University, the Netherlands
Abstract
In recent years there has been growing attention for so-called crimmigration prisons:
all-foreign prisons with immigration staff embedded where not rehabilitation, but
deportation is the ultimate aim. Following Norway and the United Kingdom, since
2014 the Netherlands is another country with such a prison. This article analyses
penal policies in the Netherlands vis-a
`-vis foreign national prisoners, including the
establishment of the crimmigration prison. Drawing on extensive empirical fieldwork
in the crimmigration prison, it subsequently examines how this is experienced and
understood by both prison officers and foreign national officers. The results show
that the limited opportunities to work on rehabilitation means that prison officers
struggle to find meaning and satisfaction in their work. For prisoners, experienc es in
the crimmigration prison strongly depend on their subjective identity and attachment
to the Netherlands. Whereas the lack of meaningful activities and remote location of
the prison considerably add to the pains they experience, specific elements of the
prison also help to mitigate some of the pains foreign national prisoners most com-
monly experience, especially isolation and uncertainty. The article finishes by a discus-
sion about what this says about how the state should treat individuals it seeks to both
punish and deport.
Corresponding author:
Jelmer Brouwer, Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, Leiden University, Steenschuur 25, 2311 ES,
Leiden, the Netherlands.
Email: j.brouwer@law.leidenuniv.nl
Punishment & Society
2020, Vol. 22(5) 703–722
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520915825
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Keywords
all-foreign national prison, bordered penality, crimmigration, foreign national prisoners,
pains of imprisonment, prison officers, Netherlands
In many European countries the growing merger between criminal justice and
migration control – also referred to as crimmigration – has had drastic implica-
tions for both the nature of the prison population and the characteristics of pun-
ishment (Aas, 2014; Stumpf, 2006). First, as migration acts have increasingly been
criminalised, and many states have lowered the threshold for terminating migrants’
legal right to stay following a criminal conviction, the number of foreign national
prisoners in many – primarily western – European countries has considerably
increased (Ugelvik, 2014). Second, states increasingly see deportation as a legiti-
mate instrument of crime control and a way to protect public safety (Turnbull and
Hasselberg, 2017). As a result, the punishment of foreign national prisoners has
undergone drastic changes, being aimed primarily at deportation instead of deter-
rence and rehabilitation. This has serious consequences for how punishment is
experienced (Bosworth et al., 2016).
It has been observed that penal interventions directed at foreign nationals with-
out a legal right to stay in the country are no longer limited to defining society’s
moral boundaries, but also about establishing the boundaries of belonging and
membership (Bosworth et al., 2017). As various scholars have pointed out, the
result of such developments is the emergence of a parallel criminal justice system
for foreign nationals that takes on aims that are traditionally within the realm of
migration control (Fekete and Webber, 2010; Kaufman, 2015). Aas (2014: 525–
526) refers to this parallel penal system as ‘bordered penality’, observing that
‘when deprived of their freedom, foreign national prisoners are increasingly
placed in separate institutions, or institutional arrangements, and afforded differ-
ent procedural treatment and standard of rights than citizens.’ When the criminal
justice system is directed at foreign nationals, it becomes more openly exclusion-
ary: the aim is no longer to prepare prisoners for their return into society, but to
permanently exclude them from the territory (Bosworth, 2011a). Citizenship has
come to constitute a ‘legitimate sorting device’ between inclusive and exclusive
sanctions (Turnbull and Hasselberg, 2017: 136).
The most direct expression of bordered penality is the creation of separate
prisons specifically for foreign nationals. In several European countries such ‘crim-
migration prisons’ have emerged that exclusively hold foreign national prisoners
and ‘where immigration control purposes either are added to, or replace, such
traditional aims of prisons as punishment, deterrence and rehabilitation’
(Ugelvik and Damsa, 2018: 1026). Although the concept of crimmigration has
been criticised on multiple accounts, including for overemphasising the aspect of
criminalisation (Kaufman, 2015; Moffette, 2018), it has always been intended to
704 Punishment & Society 22(5)
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