Privatisation and accountability in Australian immigration detention: A case of state-corporate symbiosis
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221135175 |
| Author | Mark Yin |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
Privatisation and
accountability in Australian
immigration detention: A
case of state-corporate
symbiosis
Mark Yin
University of Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Across the global north, immigration detention has become an increasingly common
punishment for ‘illegal’movement between borders. The punitive nature of Australia’s
border protection laws is enhanced by a privatised and offshored model of operation,
drawing in corporations and neighbouring territories to sustain a policy of indefinite,
offshore detention. Reading these arrangements as resulting in actions that might be
described as state-corporate crime, this article considers how such punitive regimes
are sustained by the institutional actors who operationalise them. It analyses documents
tabled before the Australian Senate in 2019 which detail the contractual relationship
between the Department of Home Affairs and private security provider Paladin.
Communications materials in particular, including emails and meeting minutes, reveal
a compromised framework of accountability that failed to apprehend underlying
forms of harm in offshore detention, therefore sustaining its capacity to punish. The
results also suggest a shared interest between government and Paladin in maintaining
this compromised framework, and an absence of voices which might challenge it.
Noting that public-private contracts are commonplace in contemporary punitive
regimes, the article concludes by interrogating the place for human rights compliance
within these regimes.
Keywords
accountability, Australia, harm, human rights, offshore detention, regulation,
privatisation, public-private contracts, state-corporate crime
Corresponding author:
Mark Yin, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC 3010, Australia.
Email: mark.yin@unimelb.edu.au
Article
Punishment & Society
2023, Vol. 25(4) 1119–1137
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14624745221135175
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
Introduction
Mandatory immigration detention has been Australian policy for almost three decades,
and its punitive nature is well-established (Grewcock, 2015; Nethery & Holman, 2016;
Taylor, 2021). Extensive research and advocacy has demonstrated that conditions in
Australian detention centres are physically and psychologically deleterious, tantamount
to ‘torture’(Isaacs, 2016; McPhail et al., 2016), and that they consistently breach detai-
nees’human rights (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2020; Briskman & Mason,
2015). Meanwhile, the Australian government remains distanced from responsibility for
these harms, a position facilitated by the sector’s privatisation—first introduced in 1996
—and offshore processing, introduced in 2001 (Dehm, 2020). This model has not only
persisted to the present day, but has generated increasingly lucrative contracts since;
Australia’s‘crimmigration prisons’are today a billion-dollar industry (Brouwer, 2020;
Higgins, 2021).
In 2017, the Australian Department of Home Affairs contracted private security pro-
vider Paladin to administer detention centres on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, an
island state north-west of Australia, in the Pacific. Within two years, this contract became
mired in corruption allegations concerning the opaque process through which the con-
tracts were tendered, money laundering charges faced by one of Paladin’s directors,
and business ties between another director and the Papua New Guinean government
(Grigg, Shapiro, et al., 2019). Given the size of this contract, valued at over $500
million (Karp, 2020), it seems astonishing that the Australian government failed to
detect or prosecute the corruption, real or perceived, that clouded their contractor over
these two years.
On the one hand, Australia’s offshore detention policy represents an expansion of
penal infrastructure to the sphere of immigration, reflecting a trend in the global north
towards conflating criminal and immigration law (Bosworth & Turnbull, 2018;
Stumpf, 2006). This has given rise to numerous carceral sites, both on the mainland
and offshore, intended to punish and deport rather than process and integrate people
seeking asylum; such institutions subject refugees to penal harms, that is isolation,
uncertainty and deprivation of liberty typical of carceral sites, despite their not
having committed a crime (Brouwer, 2020). However, the parallels between criminal
justice and migration control include not only the treatment of detainees, but also the
growing privatisation of both sectors under neoliberal policies, with the state outsour-
cing these punitive responsibilities to the market (Morris, 2019: 53; Penovic, 2014;
Wacquant, 2009). To this extent, immigration detention can be understood as its
own industrial complex, following the prison-industrial complex in the United
States, that is the proliferation of privately-run prisons which both generates profit
and satisfies political expediency (Davis, 2003; Golash-Boza, 2009). This privatisa-
tion has not only exacerbated the punitive treatment of detainees but also fostered a
capacity for human rights abuse due to the secrecy and limited external scrutiny in
the sector, as well as plausible deniability on the part of government (Dehm, 2020;
Ghezelbash, 2020; McPhail et al., 2016; Neil & Peterie, 2018). As such, immigration
detention can also be understood as a form of state-corporate crime, in this case a
1120 Punishment & Society 25(4)
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