Immigration Removal Centres: Crimmigration, Race and Asylum Mental Health

This chapter outlines how non-citizens (asylum seekers, Channel crossers, and foreign national offenders) are subject to criminal justice logic. It finds that crimmigration laws and policies uphold a gendered, racialised, and abnormal system of justice in which asylum seekers who commit no crime have reduced access to justice; ex-prisoners who serve a custodial sentence face additional punishment as foreign nationals; and both experience pains of immigration-incarceration beyond established prison pains and norms. It argues that the State’s infliction of legal violence on the already vulnerable compounds existing and generates new mental health trauma in persons without protective rights of citizenship. It concludes that while carceral reforms may benefit some confined, a deeper conversation is needed with crimmigration, neoliberalism, humane confinement and carceral (un)design—reserved for the volume’s closing chapter.