Closed detention centres in Europe – a comparative study

What is everyday life in closed detention centres like for immigrants in Norway, Italy and other European countries? How does it differ from or resemble being in prison?

Photo: istock

About the project

Immigration detention centres represent new, hybrid forms of confinement. The objective of this project is to examine these institutions in their own terms as well as compare them to prisons.

The project will map the various regimes of immigration detention in Europe throgh gathering and systematization of data available from official national and European statistics, on the Internet, as well as through other channels (e.g. research network connections). Further it will gather information about the so-called ‘moral climate’ of specific detention centres, which will enable comparisons of detention centres with each other, as well as with various types of prison institutions (closed, open, remand, motivational, drug rehabilitation, etc.) across a variety of European jurisdictions.

The project will also consist of ethnographic field work (observation as well as qualitative interviews) in detention centres, and will be drawing on institutional ethnography emphasizing connections between the specific sites and situations of everyday life, professional practice, and policy making, with a view to particularly explore the relationships of power and resistance in the institutions.

The comparative perspective will enable the project to map the variety of these institutional practices throughout Europe. This project can be seen as further contribution to the current highly productive scholarly considerations of comparative penal policy, expanding the view of penal policy (and the measuring scale of punitiveness) to include detention centres and other crimmigration control agencies and policies in the process.

 

The project is conducted by Thomas Ugelvik

 

Financing

This project is a sub-project of Crime Control in the Borderlands of Europe funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

Published June 16, 2016 9:38 AM - Last modified June 21, 2016 12:47 PM