A strange silence

As seen in Chapter 1, the Home Office was using contractors to keep immigration detainees in custody for almost a quarter of a century before the first contracted prison opened. Yet until very recently, there had been hardly a single serious study of these places of detention.

That silence is all the more remarkable when one considers that immigration detainees are far more vulnerable than prisoners, perhaps knowing no one in the UK and not speaking English; that unlike prisons, the majority of detainees are in the custody of private contractors; and that little of the apparatus of inspection, control and accountability that always applied to prisons was in place for immigration detention until well after the detention estate had been created. When Securicor started its contract at Heathrow in 1970, there were no rules in place, and some doubt whether Securicor staff even had any legal power of detention; it appears that until the passage of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, there was no statutory power for the Chief Inspector to inspect immigration detention centres; while visiting committees, the equivalent of Prison Board of Visitors, appear to have been introduced only in 2001 (via the Detention Centre Rules 2001).

Why this lack of interest? In part because of professional demarcation: criminologists were not – until very recently – interested in immigration detention centres, because they were not part of the criminal justice system. Of those who were interested in immigration control, some deplored the very notion of detention: for them there was no such thing as a ‘good’ detention centre. Others who supported control were mainly concerned about the low rate of removal.

Very recently there has been a spate of interest in the subject, most notably Mary Bosworth's Inside immigration detention (2014), which applied to immigration detention some of the same approaches pioneered by the Cambridge criminologists in prisons, described in Chapter 8.

Development of the immigration detention estate

Another reason for the historic lack of interest in the subject may be that until comparatively recently, there was not much immigration detention capacity to study. Until 1993, the only designated immigration detention capacity, apart from the very small short term holding units at some ports and airports, was the Harmondsworth unit, holding about 60 detainees.