From prison to detention: The carceral trajectories of foreign-national prisoners in the United Kingdom
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516660695 |
| Author | Sarah Turnbull,Ines Hasselberg |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
2017, Vol. 19(2) 135–154
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474516660695
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Article
From prison to
detention: The
carceral trajectories
of foreign-national
prisoners in the
United Kingdom
Sarah Turnbull and Ines Hasselberg
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
The United Kingdom has taken an increasingly punitive stance towards ‘foreign crim-
inals’ using law and policy to pave the way for their expulsion from the country.
Imprisonment, then, becomes the first stage in a complex process intertwining identity,
belonging and punishment. We draw here on research data from two projects to
understand the carceral trajectories of foreign-national offenders in the UK. We con-
sider the lived experiences of male foreign-nationals in two sites: prison and immigra-
tion detention. The narratives presented show how imprisonment and detention
coalesce within the deportation regime as a ‘double punishment’, one that is highly
racialised and gendered. We argue that the UK’s increasingly punitive response to
foreign-national offenders challenges the traditional purposes of punishment by side-
stepping prisoners’ rehabilitative efforts and denying ‘second chances’ while enacting
permanent exclusion through bans on re-entry.
Keywords
citizenship, foreign-national prisoners, immigration detention, prison, punishment,
rehabilitation, reintegration, United Kingdom
Corresponding author:
Sarah Turnbull, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford
OX1 3UQ, UK.
Email: sarah.turnbull@crim.ox.ac.uk
Introduction
Over the past two decades, the United Kingdom (UK) has taken an increasingly
punitive stance towards ‘foreign criminals’ through both law and policy. These
reforms have paved the way for the automatic expulsion
1
of foreign-nationals
who have been convicted and sentenced to terms of imprisonment greater than
12 months.
2
Such law and policy changes are shifting both the purposes and experi-
ences of punishment in the UK through the production of deportable subjects
whose rights to remain begin to unravel upon conviction. Imprisonment is often
the first stage in a complex process in which identity, belonging and punishment
intertwine in the lives of those enmeshed in what Peutz and De Genova (2010) term
the deportation regime. For many non-citizen residents of the UK, the conse-
quences of criminal convictions are increasingly serious and life-shattering, poten-
tially undoing long histories of habitation, familial relations and livelihoods.
The punitive targeting of ‘foreign criminals’ in the UK underscores the import-
ance of citizenship in studies of punishment and the ever-increasing role of penal
power in the governance of global migration (Aas, 2014; Aas and Bosworth, 2013).
The intersection of immigration and crime control measures can be seen in the
growing numbers of foreign-nationals confined in the prisons of a number of
European countries (Bosworth et al., 2016; Colombo, 2013; International Centre
for Prison Studies, 2015; Ugelvik, 2014a; Wacquant, 1999), along with concerns
about their treatment (Aliverti, 2016; Kaufman, 2015; Light, 2016; Martynowicz,
2016; Zedner, 2013) and focused state efforts at deportation (Aas, 2014; Fekete and
Webber, 2010; Stumpf, 2013; Wacquant, 2008). As Gibney (2013: 218) observes the
apparent hostility to ‘foreign criminals’ may be ‘rooted in a widespread view that
non-citizens convicted of crimes are particularly undeserving of sympathy because
they have betrayed the hospitality of the society that let them enter and live in the
state’. Gendered, racialised and classed discourses about criminality, belonging and
desert factor into the perceived deportability of this group and are connected to
historical and contemporary practices of bordering and punishment in postcolonial
Britain (Earle and Phillips, 2013; Fekete, 2001; Weber and Bowling, 2008). In this
context, citizenship – and the lack thereof – serves as a ‘legitimate sorting device’
for penal responses while concealing the ways in which ‘foreignness’ is constituted
vis-a
`-vis ideas about gender, race, ethnicity, culture and class (Aliverti, 2016: 125;
Wacquant, 1999).
This paper brings together research data from two distinct projects to help
understand the carceral trajectories of foreign-national prisoners in the UK.
3
It
considers the lived experiences of male foreign-nationals in two custodial sites,
prison and immigration detention, highlighting how imprisonment and detention
coalesce within the UK deportation regime and change the character and experi-
ence of confinement for those who are not British citizens. At the same time that
immigration enforcement is ever more present in the prison system, confinement
for foreign-nationals extends well beyond sentence time. For these men, punish-
ment extends outwards, through the gates of the prisons in which they serve their
sentences, past the immigration detention centres where they are then held as they
136 Punishment & Society 19(2)
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