Shame on us! UK immigrant Prisons.
What’s wrong with them? Are they necessary? What should we do?
It is 4 in the morning. You are woken by people hammering on your door and threatening to force entry. Rubbing the sleep out of your eyes you stumble along the corridor, open the door, and are met by a terrifying spectacle: there are armed men there…
They arrest you and take you to prison. You know you’ve not committed any crime … but you aren’t being charged with one. The decision to put you in prison hasn’t been taken by any court but by a single official. You are given no opportunity to plead your innocence, no explanation of your rights, no easy access to a lawyer, and, worst of all, as they turn the keys, you learn that you are being incarcerated indefinitely.
A scene from a science fiction dystopia, right?
Wrong. It’s an everyday event. This is what currently happens to thousands of asylum seekers every year in the UK, courtesy of the ‘Home Office’. Never was a government department less appropriately named.
The current situation in the UK
The UK has one of the largest detention estates in Europe and unlike every other government in the EU, the UK government reserves the right to detain people indefinitely. This is also without charge, and without you necessarily having offended. Some have committed offences (usually minor), but this isn’t why they’re being held as they will already have been punished for their offences elsewhere. It must feel to them like double punishment though.
In the year ending March 2022 the Home Office imprisoned nearly 25,000 people in this way in what it calls ‘Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs). They don’t like to call them prisons — but does being locked in an overcrowded room, with no openable window, without a handle on the inside of the door, and sharing a toilet in full view of the other inmates remind you of anything? These are prisons in all but name. You are not allowed out. Employees at IRCs are instructed to refer to the cells as ‘rooms’ but they are so obviously cells that almost everyone refers to them that way. It is Orwellian doublespeak to call them anything else.
One reason the Home Office may not want to call prisons: prisons or cells: cells is that this would mean they would be would subject to the more rigorous legislation attached to running prisons. As things stand immigration detention, which falls under the 1971 Immigration Act, is subject to fewer checks than detention within the criminal justice system and, as already referenced, the decision to detain someone can be made by an individual immigration officer and there’s no requirement for it to be subject to an independent review at any stage. This means that in many cases the Home Office never has to justify its decision to deprive an individual of their liberty.
Because of this, the decision to imprison someone is often made without a thorough assessment of the nature of their asylum claim, thus failing to adequately screen out those who are particularly vulnerable to re-traumatisation through being imprisoned. For instance, significant numbers of torture victims end up being detained in IRCs. The legislation says this shouldn’t happen, but we know it does because the Home Office pays out increasing amounts of money for wrongful detention. In the year ending March 2021, there were 330 proven cases of wrongful detention, for which a total of £9.3m was paid in compensation — up from £0.8 million for 38 cases in 2014–15.
There are 10 IRCs in the UK run by private firms such as Mitie, G4S, Serco and the GEO group. This costs the UK tax payer around £100 million a year. Due to ‘Commercial confidentiality agreements’ the Home Office and outsourcing companies are conveniently not obliged to publish detailed financial information. But we know it’s big business and according to a Guardian report, huge profits of up to 30% are being made.
Huge profits out of misery, that is. For, quite apart from the distress of being held captive, indefinitely and without charge, conditions inside these places are appalling. A series of government reports have exposed significant systemic deficiencies and major on-going concerns about standards of care. Additionally, there are frequent reports of riots, outbreaks of violence, escape attempts, arson, bullying, unexplained deaths, self-harm and suicide
In 2017 the BBC’s Panorama programme aired a documentary Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets showing footage, recorded secretly, by a staff member at Brook House IRC, run by G4S. No less than 84 incidents of racist bullying, extreme violence from guards, and other institutionalised cruelty were documented.
G4S got away with a fine of just £2,768 — a trivial amount when compared to the profits it was making of around £2 million each year, and none of the staff were prosecuted. G4S also retained their contract with the Home Office and were even offered further contracts. For a full analysis of how the Home Office responded to this exposure with obfuscation, resistance to public scrutiny, and a lack of effective measures to improve the situation at Brook House see my article here.
IRCs are cruel in their current manifestation. But are they ultimately necessary?
Reasons given for imprisoning immigrants typically include one or more of the following:
1. To establish their identity or the basis of their immigration or asylum claim.
2. Because it is convenient for the Home Office to store people somewhere whilst they decide what to do.
3. When ‘release is not considered to be conducive to the public good.’
4. To remove the person from the UK
5. When it is thought that there would otherwise be a serious risk of the person absconding/going underground.
The first two reasons are hard to condone. Determining someone’s identity and the basis of their claim doesn’t require imprisonment. All the evidence suggests that whilst asylum seekers rarely abscond whilst they are still awaiting a determination of their status. This is because they’re still hopeful of a good outcome and know that if they don’t follow the rules it will count against them. ‘Convenience’ is insufficient reason for depriving someone of their liberty in such a draconian way. Further, there are established examples from around the world of cheaper and much more humane community-based alternatives to detention that can be used for people falling into these categories without significant risk of them absconding. I shall be writing an article about these schemes within the next few weeks. (so, if you want to read this follow this publication: Refugee Think Tank or email me directly: wyonstansfeld@gmail.com to ask me to advise you when it is published.)
The third reason: that releasing them might not be ‘conducive to the public good’, is even less supportable. If someone is a public threat then this can appropriately be dealt with under criminal justice or mental health legislation, both of which have checks and balances and are open to public scrutiny. If the asylum seeker in question is not considered a sufficient threat for using such legislation, then ‘not being conducive to public good’ becomes a reduced, highly subjective, and vague criterion. Depriving someone of their liberty is a huge step to take that should require robust and proportional justification. Allowing a single individual to use such an articulation, perhaps on a whim, to remove a person’s liberty, invites injustice.
The final two reasons are, arguably, the most justifiable, especially when linked together. Once someone knows they are going to be deported there is more risk of them absconding.
But the current system is not working humanely or effectively. Rather than holding people for just a few hours, whilst it implements a pre-existing plan for deportation, the Home Office frequently holds detainees for much longer periods whilst it attempts to work out how to deport them. This is a case of putting the cart before the horse.
Detention periods in IRCs have declined in recent years but some people are still routinely imprisoned for months, or even years. Moreover, Home Office ‘success’ in deporting people from IRCs has declined in recent years. In 2010, 64% of people leaving detention left the UK — either voluntarily, or under Home Office enforcement. By March 2022, this had fallen to a record low of 14% (only about one in 7) indicating that most detainees are prematurely imprisoned with a view to deportation when, actually, there isn’t a viable plan in place for doing this.
The following histogram, sourced from Home Office statistics, shows how few people are deported. We can see that virtually nobody from Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan and Afghanistan were deported. Interestingly, these are the main countries of origin for people crossing the channel unofficially. The figures overall indicate that large numbers of people are being detained for reasons other than a decision having been made to deport them with a plan of action in place as to how to do this. This situation is likely to continue as long as the Home Office is allowed to hold people indefinitely.
Top 10 nationalities leaving detention by reason for leaving for the year ending June 2022
Limits could be placed on how long someone can be held in an IRC (as they are in all other European Countries), say for a maximum of 24 hours, whilst they await imminent detention. The Home Office does not publish average figures for the amount of time that people are kept in detention but looking at their figures for time in custody at the point of release we can calculate a safely conservative estimate of average time spent in detention as at least 20 days. Reducing this to one day, as well as requiring that the only reason for detention should be ‘deportation with a viable plan for it’ would enable a massive contraction of the detention estate and, with that, huge savings to the tax payer (current expenditure on detention being around £100 million per annum) and a resultant huge reduction in suffering. Win, win all round. Except that it would be less ‘convenient’.
But far from following this approach numbers held in detention have been on the rise recently (after having been reduced on account of the pandemic) and plans to re-open Campsfield House IRC in Oxfordshire indicate that the government plans to expand the estate further.
Conclusion
UK citizens should rightly be ashamed of the UK detention estate in its current manifestation. It has an appalling track record, is costly, ineffective and inhumane. Moreover there are good examples worldwide of alternative ways of managing asylum seekers, with greater humanity, without having to imprison them, and with low risk of them absconding. For more information on this see my article: Viable Alternatives to Immigration Prisons.
If it is to be retained at all (and the need for this is debatable) then this should be done in a hugely reduced form, with detention only being allowed following a court decision and then only for those asylum seekers awaiting certain deportation, for which there is a viable plan, and with a short, legally fixed limit on the amount of time they can be retained for this purpose.
Finally, immigrant prisons should not be sub-contracted to private profit-motivated firms (as this has manifestly been shown not to work). Instead, they should be run by the government, with properly trained, ethically sound, staff; as transparently as possible, with proper complaints and whistle-blowing procedures, and open to full, regular, independent, scrutiny. The substantial savings to be made from significantly reducing the estate should enable this to be paid for properly with ample money to spare for extensive community-based alternatives to detention.
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