Criticisms on the use of Prison for Immigration Detention and Further Reading
HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP), the National Offender Management Service, and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), have all stated in successive years that prisons are not suitable for holding people for administrative immigration, other than for very short periods, or in exceptional circumstances where specific risk factors have been identified.
In HMIP’s most recent 2022 thematic review on the use of detention in prison, they found a failure to meet their previous recommendation that:
Immigration detainees should only be held in prison in very exceptional circumstances following risk assessment and with the authority of an immigration judge. (Recommendation for People in Prison: Immigration Detention, HMIP Findings Paper 2015).
In the most recent visit to the UK by The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) to examine the treatment and conditions of detention of persons held under immigration legislation (2023) they re-asserted:
At the outset, the CPT wishes to reiterate that, as a matter of principle, it considers that persons who have served their prison sentence should not continue to be held in prison under immigration legislation but should be transferred to an IRC. This is because immigration detention should not be punitive in character: it is not a sanction or a punishment. Therefore, persons in immigration detention should be afforded both a regime and material conditions appropriate to their legal situation.
There has also been important research into the ways in which race, racism, immigration control and criminalisation intersect with issues of citizenship, belonging and identity. The deportation of so called “foreign criminals” cannot be separated from these social structures and hierarchies.
Last updated
Was this helpful?