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Michelle Peterie

Visiting
Immigration
Detention
Care and Cruelty in Australia’s
Asylum Seeker Prisons
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

G l o b a l m i g r at i o n a n d s o c i a l c h a n g e

Global Migration and Social

Change series
Series Editor: Nando Sigona,
University of Birmingham, UK

The Global Migration and Social Change series showcases original research that
looks at the nexus between migration, citizenship and social change.

Forthcoming in the series:

Postcoloniality and Forced Migration

Mobility, Control, Agency
Edited by Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, Sharla M. Fett, Lucy Mayblin,
Nina Sahraoui and Eva Magdalena Stambøl

Navigating the European Migration Regime

Male Migrants, Interrupted Journeys and Precarious Lives
Anna Wyss

Out now in the series:

Temporality in Mobile Lives
Contemporary Asia–Australia Migration and Everyday Time
Shanthi Robertson
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

Negotiating Migration in the Context of Climate Change

International Policy and Discourse
Sarah Nash

Belonging in Translation
Solidarity and Migrant Activism in Japan
Reiko Shindo

Find out more at

bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/global-migration-and-social-change

Peterie, M 2022, Visiting Immigration Detention : Care and Cruelty in Australia's Asylum Seeker Prisons, Bristol University Press,
Bristol. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [13 July 2023].
Created from rmit on 2023-07-13 03:24:30.
Global Migration and Social
Change series
Series Editor: Nando Sigona,
University of Birmingham, UK

International advisory board:

Leah Bassel, University of Roehampton, UK
Avtar Brah, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Sergio Carrera, CEPS, Belgium
Elaine Chase, University College London, UK
Alessio D’Angelo, Middlesex University, UK
Andrew Geddes, European University Institute, Italy
Roberto G. Gonzales, Harvard University, US
Elżbieta Goździak, Georgetown University, US
Jonathan Xavier Inda, University of Illinois, US
David Ingleby, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Anna Lindley, SOAS University of London, UK
Cecilia Menjívar, University of California, US
Peter Nyers, McMaster University, Canada
Jenny Phillimore, University of Birmingham, UK
Ben Rogaly, University of Sussex, UK
Paul Spoonley, Massey University, New Zealand
Susanne Wessendorf, London School of Economics, UK
Amanda Wise, Macquarie University, Australia
Elisabetta Zontini, University of Nottingham, UK
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

Find out more at

bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/global-migration-and-social-change

Peterie, M 2022, Visiting Immigration Detention : Care and Cruelty in Australia's Asylum Seeker Prisons, Bristol University Press,
Bristol. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [13 July 2023].
Created from rmit on 2023-07-13 03:24:30.
VISITING
IMMIGRATION
DETENTION
Care and Cruelty in Australia’s Asylum
Seeker Prisons
Michelle Peterie
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

Bristol University Press

University of Bristol
1–9 Old Park Hill
Bristol
BS2 8BB
UK
t: +44 (0)117 374 6645
e: bup-info@bristol.ac.uk

Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

© Bristol University Press 2022

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-5292-2660-7 hardcover

ISBN 978-1-5292-2661-4 paperback
ISBN 978-1-5292-2662-1 ePub
ISBN 978-1-5292-2663-8 ePdf

The right of Michelle Peterie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press.

Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material.
If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher.

The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and
not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol
University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any
material published in this publication.

Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age
and sexuality.

Cover design: Andrew Corbett

Front cover image: Shutterstock/estherpoon
Bristol University Press use environmentally responsible print partners
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CMP, Poole

List of Abbreviations vi
Acknowledgements vii
Series Preface ix
Preface xi

Introduction: Studying Immigration Detention 1

1 Immigration Detention in Australia 9
2 Theorizing Detention Centres as Prisons 28
3 Bureaucratic Violence 36
4 Witnessing the Pains of Imprisonment 55
5 Care and Resistance 78
6 Forced Relocations 96
7 Reverberating Harms 113
Conclusion: Tacit Intentionality and the Weaponization of Despair 133

Notes 141
References 144
Index 171
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation

ABF Australian Border Force
AHRC Australian Human Rights Commission
AITA Adelaide Immigration Transit Accommodation
APOD Alternative Place of Detention
BITA Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation
CALD Culturally and Linguistically Diverse
IDC Immigration Detention Centre
ITA Immigration Transit Accommodation
MITA Melbourne Immigration Detention Centre
NGO Non-Government Organization
PNG Papua New Guinea
PTSD Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
RCOA Refugee Council of Australia
UN United Nations
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

First and foremost, I would like to thank the many people who participated
in this study as interviewees. Were it not for their generosity and strength,
this book would not have been possible. Particular thanks to those who
entrusted me with sensitive or distressing testimonies, and to those who
welcomed me into their communities as a friend. I hope that this book
does justice to your experiences, and to those of the people you support
in detention.
It takes a village to raise a researcher, and I am profoundly grateful for
mine. This book began as a PhD project at the University of Sydney
(USYD), and was extended, reimagined and refined during Postdoctoral
Research Fellowships at the University of Queensland (UQ) and the
University of Wollongong (UOW). The fieldwork that informs this
book was funded by an Australian Research Training Program Stipend
Scholarship, a USYD Travel Grant, and a UQ Small Research Grant.
I gratefully acknowledge both this financial support and the institutional
backing it represents.
I owe a debt of gratitude to innumerable colleagues within and beyond
USYD, UQ and UOW. While it is not possible to thank everyone individually,
several people deserve specific acknowledgement. Heartfelt thanks to
Dr David Neil, without whose long-term influence and intellectual
generosity this book may never have been started, and would certainly not
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

exist in its current form. Deepest gratitude to my PhD supervisors, Dr Susan

Banki and Professor Stephen Castles, who provided guidance, oversight and
support through the doctoral project that began this research. Sincerest thanks
to Professor Gillian Triggs, Professor Scott Poynting and Associate Professor
Caroline Fleay, who gave valuable feedback concerning that initial project
and galvanized me in my desire to continue this work. Warmest thanks
to mentors Professor Greg Marston, Professor Gaby Ramia and Professor
Alex Broom –as well as dear friends and writing companions Dr Louise St
Guillaume, Dr Derya Ozkul and Dr Dora Anthony –who have provided
unwavering encouragement and gentle accountability as this book has taken
form. Deepest gratitude to psychologist Dr Carole Carter, who helped me
to navigate my own emotions during fieldwork for this project, and to the

vii

countless people who –at different times and in different ways –have lent
me their wisdom and hope.
Thank you to the team at Bristol University Press/Policy Press who saw
the potential in this book and guided me through the publication process.
Particular thanks to editor Shannon Kneis, series editor Professor Nando
Sigona, and project manager Matt Deacon. Thank you also to Ella Sellwood
and the anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript for this book prior
to its publication and provided feedback.
Finally, deepest thanks to my family, and to those dear friends who qualify
as such. I think in particular of my Mum and Dad; of Luke, Simone, Hayden
and Emily; of David; of Jack and Marg; and of my MHS, John Street and
contemplative community friends. You have nurtured my dreams, supported
my endeavours, celebrated my successes, and been my soft place to land.
I appreciate you immensely and love you beyond words.
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

viii

Michelle Peterie’s book is the eighth in the Global Migration and Social
Change series. Visiting Immigration Detention offers a captivating account of
Australia’s onshore immigration detention system and its negative individual
and societal impacts. The aim of our book series is to offer a platform
for original, engaged and thought-provoking scholarship in refugee and
migration studies, open to different disciplinary perspectives, theoretical
frameworks and methodological approaches. Peterie’s book fully matches our
aim by painting a vivid and worrying portrait of the working and function
of Australia’s onshore immigration detention facilities, contrasting the care
and friendship exchanged between detainees and regular visitors with the
institutional violence of the immigration regime.
The book will resonate with students, researchers and everyone keen
to understand the impact of immigration detention regimes, offering
in-depth insights into one that, since the early 2000s, has attracted extensive
international attention and produced highly polarized views – for many the
Australian approach institutionally violates the human rights of migrants and
refugees and breaches the country’s international obligations towards those
in need of international protection. For others, like the current UK Home
Secretary, it offers a template to follow for the reform of the immigration
system. The New Plan for Immigration promoted by the British government
under Boris Johnson explicitly refers to Australia as a positive example to
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

follow in its attempt to deter the arrivals of asylum seekers to the UK. The
UK has been looking closely in particular to Australia’s policy of offshore
asylum processing, which has removed detainees from public view and
reduced accountability by placing detention facilities outside the jurisdiction
of its courts. However, as Peterie’s book shows, Australia also has an onshore
detention system which is also opaque. Detainees in this system, Peterie
argues, ‘are hidden in plain sight – held in prison-like centres’, many in
remote and hard-to-access locations. The book offers unique insight into
detention facilities and the harm produced by immigration detention through
the accounts of 70 detainees’ friends and loved ones as they enter detention
as private visitors. In doing so, the book makes three important contributions
to scholarship on immigration detention. First, it exposes everyday carceral

practices and their consequences on health, hope and relationships. Second,

it expands our understanding of who is harmed by such practices, and how
harmful practices reverberate and affect inmates and visitors. Finally, the
author makes a compelling case for understanding these harmful practices
and effects not as accidental or unintentional, but as epitomising a policy
logic that accepts cruelty as a mechanism of control.

Nando Sigona
Oxford, March 2022
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

Care-based interventions in situations of injustice attract significant suspicion

in the social sciences. Scholars caution that caring responses to social issues
often ignore the structural causes of suffering, obscuring systemic problems
by focusing on meeting the needs of individuals. Concerns about power
discrepancies are also prominent. Seemingly altruistic ‘caregivers’ are charged
with reinforcing social hierarchies, adopting privileged roles as heroes and
saviours while ‘care recipients’ are locked into disempowered positions
as helpless victims. The volunteer is characterized as deriving emotional
gratification from their privileged role. Such critiques are particularly
prominent in research about efforts to assist racial minorities, where colonial
patterns of power and domination can endure and thrive under a veil of
altruism and good intentions.
But do clear lines always exist between the personal and the political,
between care and activism? And what happens to interpersonal power
dynamics in institutional spaces characterized by violence and control?
I began this research in 2015, intending to analyse the social, political and
emotional contours of asylum seeker support work at the level of personal
relationships. My interviews with participants in a range of refugee and
asylum seeker support programmes drew my attention to the work of people
who visit refugees and asylum seekers in immigration detention facilities. As
I listened to their stories, it became apparent that issues of power, privilege
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

and emotion were of critical importance to these people. I also began to

understand that these ideas held different meanings and carried different
resonances in the carceral spaces of Australia’s detention centres.
As I continued my research in different parts of Australia, I saw with
growing clarity that detention centre environments distort and to some
extent collapse conventional distinctions between empowered caregivers
and disempowered care recipients. Within detention environments, visitors
are positioned not as privileged benefactors but as quasi-prisoners. The
inaccuracy of emotional gratification claims was stark. Interviewees were
often reluctant to focus on their own emotional experiences, but when
asked acknowledged sleepless nights; feelings of shame, complicity and
powerlessness; and even clinical diagnoses of depression and Post-Traumatic

Visiting Immigration Detention

Stress Disorder. Equally, while many visitors did not identify as activists or
use the language of resistance, most nonetheless conceptualized the work
of being a friend to the stranger as a political act.
The echoes of my original research focus can still be found within this
book. My research still engages with fundamental questions of power,
privilege and emotion. But this is not the book I initially planned to write.
Concerns about power discrepancies at the interpersonal level remain
present but have been eclipsed by larger questions regarding state power,
institutional affect and policy intent. Concerns about volunteers deriving
emotional gratification from their work have at once been challenged and
become secondary to questions about how and why detention regimes inflict
harm –not only on detainees, but also on their loved ones and supporters.
The allegations of apoliticism that have been so central to critiques of care-
based volunteer work have been called into question as a more complex
picture has emerged regarding the intimate relationship between personal
care and political activism.
Drawing on more than 70 in-depth interviews with regular visitors to
Australian immigration detention facilities, as well as other corroborating
sources, this book paints a unique and vivid picture of these carceral spaces.
It tells the story of Australia’s onshore immigration detention network as
witnessed and experienced by the people who enter these spaces to offer
friendship and support. Ultimately, it offers a richer understanding of how
detainee isolation and despair is produced and weaponized through the
details of institutional life; a deeper recognition of what deterrence looks
and feels like in Australia’s onshore immigration detention system; and an
expanded appreciation of the human costs –both direct and collateral –that
this system imposes.
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

xii

The veil of secrecy

Asylum seeker deterrence policies are built on cruelty. In practice, deterrence
involves the infliction of profound harm so that people in urgent need of
refuge will seek safety elsewhere. Deterrence policies are popular with
many Australians, and governments on both sides of politics have derived
electoral advantage from hardline measures including mandatory detention.
Yet these same governments have gone to great lengths to hide or whitewash
the violence deterrence entails. This book is about these hidden realities,
and about the human and societal costs of intentionally employing cruelty
for political ends.
Australia’s immigration detention system is shrouded in secrecy.
Since 2001, people seeking protection at the border have regularly
been imprisoned in Australian-run facilities in the Pacific countries of
Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru. Australia’s now infamous policy
of offshore processing has removed detainees from public view. It has
also reduced accountability by placing detention facilities outside the
jurisdiction of Australia’s courts.
Australia’s onshore detention system is also opaque. These facilities receive
little attention in public debate and are largely invisible to the general
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

community. Detainees in this system are hidden in plain sight –held in

prison-like centres, many on the outskirts of major population centres.
One of the reasons Australia’s onshore detention facilities have fallen
beneath the radar is because the cruelty enacted within them evades easy
detection. Australia’s offshore processing facilities have attracted widespread
condemnation in part because of their overt brutality. At considerable
personal risk, detainees and whistle-blowers have ruptured the secrecy of
these centres, sharing damning evidence of harsh conditions, inadequate
medical treatment, and endemic physical and sexual violence. Given the
constraining influence of Australia’s courts, open violence and ill-treatment
are less prevalent in the onshore system. In comparison to conditions offshore,
these centres can seem humane to a casual observer.

Yet rates of self-harm in onshore detention facilities are alarmingly high

and indicate that people held within them are under significant strain.
A 2019 study by Kyli Hedrick and colleagues, for example, found that the
rate of self-harm among people in Australia’s onshore detention network
is an alarming 214 times higher than the rate of hospital-treated self-harm
in the Australian community. In contrast, the rate of self-harm among
community-based asylum seekers is four times that of hospital treated self-
harm in the Australian community.
This book offers a new and unique window into these onshore facilities,
following detainees’ friends and loved ones as they enter detention centres as
private visitors. In doing so, it makes three main contributions to the existing
scholarship on immigration detention. First, it provides a rare qualitative
account of how harm is enacted through carceral practices in Australian
onshore detention centres. It exposes the shifting systems of deprivation
and frustration that dictate life in these facilities, corroding health, hope and
relationships, and maintaining a debilitating asymmetry of power.
Second, it adds to extant understandings of who is harmed by detention
regimes. A wealth of evidence already exists concerning the devastating
impacts of detention for people who are personally incarcerated (see von
Werthern et al, 2018). Bringing together testimonies from detainees’ loves ones
and supporters around Australia, this book highlights the unacknowledged
harm detention imposes beyond the detainee. It also examines the emotional
politics of solidarity within these institutions, illuminating both the potentials
and pitfalls of care as a form of political resistance.
Finally, in locating visitor testimonies within Australia’s overarching
programme of asylum seeker deterrence, this book makes a theoretical
claim concerning why harmful practices endure and replicate in detention
environments. Researchers and human rights organizations at times frame
the adverse impacts of detention as a government failure or unintentional
oversight. This book offers an alternative diagnosis. It demonstrates that
the reverberating harms detention imposes are not failures of this system
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

but rather evidence of its essentially malign function. Cruelty is the point.

Detention as deterrence
Australia’s immigration detention policy is driven by a political commitment to
asylum seeker deterrence. Deterrence, as conceptualized in this book, can take
two forms: general deterrence or specific deterrence. General deterrence refers
to efforts to discourage would-be asylum seekers from travelling to countries
where detention policies are in place. As Ephraim Poertner (2017: 18) explains,
‘the politics of [general] deterrence produces geographies of asylum that turn
“location marketing” upside down’: countries compete with one another to
become the least attractive destination for people seeking asylum.

Immigration detention is a primary instrument in many general deterrence

regimes, but other restrictive or punitive policies can also function as general
deterrence measures. Boat turn-backs, offshore processing,1 limiting access
to permanent protection, and withholding social welfare or employment
opportunities, for example, can all have deterrent effects if they make
destination countries less attractive to asylum seekers (Gammeltoft-Hansen
and Tan, 2017; Fitzgerald, 2020).
General deterrence measures are premised on the assumption that ‘pull
factors’ (such as favourable immigration policies) influence migration flows as
much, if not more, than the ‘push factors’ that force some people to flee their
countries. It is highly unlikely that this is the case (Nethery, 2019; Bloomfield,
2016). Nonetheless, political leaders persist with policies of this kind –framing
them, in Australia’s case, as effective strategies to ‘stop the boats’.
One of the ethical problems with the general deterrence paradigm, of
course, is that many asylum seekers are fleeing violence and persecution
in their countries of origin and are thus entitled to protection. The 1951
Refugee Convention recognizes the right of forced migrants to cross national
borders without authorization to access safety. In this context, general
deterrence policies are often framed by governments as necessary efforts
to keep out people who are not really refugees (Kathrani, 2011). The fact
remains, however, that the majority of people seeking asylum in Australia
do have legitimate refugee claims (McAdam and Chong, 2014).
In addition to general deterrence, immigration detention policies can be
understood as forms of specific deterrence. Specific deterrence involves efforts
to persuade asylum seekers already in a country to abandon their refugee
claims and return home (Hassan, 2000; Leerkes and Broeders, 2010). Where
general deterrence aims to make coming to a country unattractive to all
prospective asylum seekers, specific deterrence makes it untenable for those
already in a country to stay. At times, financial and other incentives are also
provided to further incentivize repatriation (see Whyte, 2014).
Australian governments have been open in framing immigration detention
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

as an element of the country’s general deterrence policy (Coalition, 2013).

Stemming the flow of new boats of supposedly ‘non-genuine’ refugees has
been embraced as a core policy objective by Australian governments on both
sides of politics. There has been a notable reticence, however, to openly
admit that mandatory detention is also designed to harm people who have
already come to Australia for help. Despite this, there is clear evidence that
Australia has subjected people in detention to intentional cruelty in the
service of specific deterrence. For example, documents leaked by a whistle
blower in 2017 showed that staff at Australia’s PNG facility had been explicitly
instructed to make life unpleasant for the asylum seekers detained there,
in an effort to pressure them into accepting ‘voluntary’ repatriations. The
Guardian reported at the time that,

For more than a year, camp managers and security staff […] waged a
campaign to make Australia’s detention centre for refugees and asylum
seekers on Manus Island as inhospitable as possible. […] A plan drafted
in early 2016 outlines moves to coerce those recognised as refugees
into leaving the detention centre and accepting resettlement in Papua
New Guinea, while pushing asylum seekers to abandon their protection
claims and return home. (Boochani et al, 2017: np)

The same year, a United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee report
found that harsh conditions offshore had ‘reportedly compelled some
asylum seekers to return to their country of origin, despite the risks that
they face there’ (np). While these returns may not have technically breached
Australia’s non-refoulment obligations,2 they cannot be characterized as
genuinely voluntary (Webber, 2011; Gerver, 2017; Leerkes et al, 2017;
Peterie, 2018a).
It is rare for documents to emerge that so clearly demonstrate premeditated
cruelty in the service of specific deterrence. So far, comparable evidence
has not surfaced concerning Australia’s onshore detention system. It is the
contention of this book, however, that the onshore network must also be
understood in the light of this objective of specific deterrence. Subsequent
chapters will show that even the quotidian details of life in detention reveal
a tacit intention of specific deterrence.

The study
This book provides a unique account of Australia’s onshore immigration
detention system by documenting the experiences of people who enter
these spaces as visitors. This visitor perspective is partly a pragmatic one –
studying secure institutions if far from simple, and researchers in Australia
are routinely denied access to detention spaces (Zion et al, 2010). Yet
this perspective also underwrites the book’s main contributions as visitor
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

testimonies help illuminate both the less-obvious strategies through which

isolation and desperation are produced in detention, and the reverberating
impacts of this carceral regime.
The empirical research that informs this book took place over five years
(2015–20) and involved more than 70 in-depth interviews3 with regular
visitors to Australia’s onshore detention facilities. Participants variously
described themselves as volunteers, advocates, activists, and/or friends to
people in detention, and often saw themselves as fulfilling more than one
of these roles simultaneously. The majority of participants came from non-
refugee backgrounds and were permanent residents or citizens of Australia.
Most had begun visiting detention because they wished to render assistance.
The two things all participants had in common were a close connection to

at least one person in detention, and regular physical interactions with the
detention machine.
Interviewees were invited to share their stories of visiting detention.
Participants told me about their original decisions to commence their visits.
They explained what visiting involved on a practical level, both physically
and emotionally, and reflected on the escalating rules and restrictions that
governed their visits. They spoke at length about the friendships they
developed within detention; about how the logic of the detention system
shaped their (new and existing) relationships; and about their efforts to both
offer and receive hospitality and care. Visitors talked about their friends’
lives in detention and described –often through tears –the human costs of
mandatory detention. They also shared their own struggles to endure the
damaging effects of the system.
Participants were asked if any memories stood out to them as highlights or
lowlights, or as otherwise representative of what visiting detention entailed.
Making room for narratives in qualitative interviews is valuable because it
gives participants greater scope –through their selection and curation of
stories –to highlight what they consider to be the most salient aspects of
their experiences. It also allows participants to reflect on why these stories
are of particular significance, and to communicate the complexity of their
lives and emotional landscapes. As Jane Elliott writes, narrative-based research
affords a unique ‘understanding of the social world from the perspective of the
individuals being studied’ (2005: 122; emphasis added).
Interviews were conducted with detention centre visitors in the Australian
states of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, the
Northern Territory and South Australia. While the majority of interviewees
visited facilities in Australia’s largest cities of Sydney, Brisbane and
Melbourne, together the interviewees had visited all of the major facilities
in the onshore system as it existed during the research period,4 as well as
numerous Alternative Places of Detention (APODs) (see Figure 1.1).5
In addition to these empirical interviews, this book draws on extensive
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

archival research, conducted between 2013 and 2021. Parliamentary Hansard

database Parlinfo was used to access ministerial press releases and speeches
from recent decades; physical collections at the National Archives of Australia
were used to access older materials. This research –which focused on
the discursive narratives that have accompanied and justified government
policies –informs the historical background provided in Chapter One. The
socio-political context this research affords adds something important to
our understanding of both why the participants in this study commenced
visiting detention, and what these visits mean at the political level. Several
Freedom of Information requests were also lodged during the writing
of this book and have been used to confirm and contextualize visitor
testimonies, particularly where they describe official institutional rules and

Figure 1.1: Facilities in Australia’s onshore immigration detention network

2015–20.
Wickham Point Immigration
Detention Centre

Christmas Island
(North West Point)
Immigration
Detention Centre
Brisbane
Immigration
Transit Accommodation
Yongah Hill
Immigration
Detention Centre

Perth Immigration Adelaide Immigration Villawood Immigration

Detention Centre Transit Accommodation Detention Centre
Melbourne Immigration
Transit Accommodation

Maribyrnong Immigration
Detention Centre
Note: Facilities include Villawood IDC, Sydney; Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation
(BITA), Brisbane; Maribyrnong IDC, Melbourne; Melbourne Immigration Transit
Accommodation (MITA), Melbourne; Adelaide Immigration Transit Accommodation (AITA),
Adelaide; Perth IDC, Perth; Wickham Point IDC, Darwin; Yongah Hill IDC, Yongah Hill;
and North West Point or Christmas Island IDC, Christmas Island. The network also includes
numerous APODs.
Source: Adapted from Creative Commons, derivative work of File:Oceania98.svg by
User:Brianski

policies. Wherever possible, detainees’ own words –carefully gathered from

public social media posts, media interviews and Australian Human Rights
Commission (AHRC) inspection reports –have been included to provide
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

a first-hand perspective concerning the realities of detention centre life and

the significance of centre visitors.

Outline of the book

This book tells the story of Australia’s onshore immigration detention system
across eight chapters. Chapter One locates the system in its political and historical
context and, in doing so, explains why the participants in this study felt a moral
imperative to visit the people Australia detains. It describes the vilification and
politicization of asylum seekers in Australia, and the evolution of Australia’s
controversial policy of indefinite mandatory detention. The specific policy
backdrop for this book –Operation Sovereign Borders –is described in detail.

Chapter Two provides a theoretical scaffolding for understanding the

functions of Australia’s immigration detention facilities, and how violence is
enacted w ithin this system. Drawing on research concerning the production
of psychological pain in civilian prisons, it highlights the clandestine
mechanisms through which carceral institutions inflict pain in socio-legal
contexts where overt violence is not socially or legally tenable.
Chapter Three describes the process individuals must go through to
gain entrance to detention facilities in Australian, demonstrating that
these centres largely operate as prisons. It shows that visitor application
and entrance processes have become complex and intimidating in recent
year as centres have taken an increasingly securitized approach to visitor
admission. In describing these processes and their escalation, this chapter
begins to reveal the mechanisms of bureaucratic control that characterize
Australia’s onshore detention system. It also shows how visitors are targeted
as part of this system.
Chapter Four explores the daily realities of life in detention, as witnessed
and experienced by centre visitors. The chapter paints a detailed picture
of immigration detention facilities as prison-like environments in which
detainees are made to feel their vulnerability in the small details of
institutional life. Rules are regularly changed and erratically enforced, and
micro-level controls function to infantilize and disempower. This elaborate
system of deprivations and frustrations keeps detainees in a state of anxious
vigilance. It also extends to target visitors, positioning them as quasi-inmates
and frustrating their efforts to provide meaningful help.
Chapter Five examines the relationships that develop between detainees
and visitors, and considers the political significance of these friendships.
It shows that in an institutional context where deterrence is enacted
through the micro-level production of isolation and despair, visitors’ efforts
to disrupt the socio-emotional conditions of detention can constitute a
meaningful (if imperfect) form of political resistance. It also demonstrates
that visitor-detainee relationships can be a basis for more recognisable forms
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of political action as visitors advocate for detainees and bear public witness
to institutional violence.
Chapter Six concerns the use of involuntary movement within the
detention network. Against the backdrop of the previous chapter, it shows
that the practice of regularly relocating detainees within the detention
system attacks their networks of care and resistance. While detention
facilities are often envisaged as places of confinement, forced movement
is an important aspect of how these institutions enact power. Instability,
despair and compliance are produced not only through the bleakness of
institutional life, but also through the forced relocation of detainees between
detention facilities and away from the visitors who provide social, emotional
and instrumental support.

Chapter Seven documents the impacts of immigration detention on centre

visitors. It acknowledges the benefits visitors derive from their relationships,
but also highlights the traumatizing dimensions of the visitation experience.
Visiting detention, this chapter shows, involves witnessing trauma. It also
involves a painful experience of secondary prisonization as visitors are targeted
by a broader scheme of deprivation and frustration within the centres. The
visitation experience is thus characterized by feelings of powerlessness and
ontological disruption that at times feed into visitor attrition –thus serving
to isolate detainees and further breed despair.
The book concludes with a brief review of the study’s main findings,
emphasizing the importance of recognizing the multiple forms of violence
that immigration detention centres employ and the tacit intent that underlies
them. The harms documented in this book are not accidental but reflect
a policy logic that accepts and even requires cruelty as a mechanism of
control. In practice, deterrence involves the strategic production of despair
as detainees and their supporters are pushed to breaking point to achieve
crude political objectives.
In telling the stories of detention centre visitors, this book sheds light
on the best and worst of Australian society. It relates stories of friendship,
humanity, solidarity and resistance. Its ultimate conclusions, however, are
stark. Australia’s onshore detention system inflicts predictable and preventable
harm. It harms detainees, and it harms the people who endeavour to support
them. It does so by design.
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

Immigration Detention in Australia

Hannah’s story
It’s a windy day in Melbourne. Hannah, a dark-haired woman with a warm, open
demeanour, smiles at me across the table at the Docklands library. It is 2019 and
Hannah has been visiting people in detention for almost 17 years. For most of that
time she has visited detention at least once a week, but in recent months she has
pulled back slightly. “I’m really tired”, Hannah tells me. “I feel really traumatized.”
It was 2002 when Hannah first learnt that asylum seekers were being imprisoned
in her city. She was already involved in social justice work, and news of the detention
situation arrived via her activist networks.

‘We heard from friends in those kinds of networks that they were imprisoning
refugees in the Maribyrnong Detention Centre. We were just horrified –a
small group of us –so we contacted quite a well-known advocate […] who was
visiting, and we said, “how do we do this? We can’t believe this is happening.
Can we come in and offer some kind of support?”’

Her desire to act, Hannah explains, was deep and instinctive.

‘I feel naïve saying it now, but I think it was just about this shock of
imprisoning people, and thinking, this is outrageous and we need to let
these people know that there are people out here who think that. And that
they’re not alone. And that we would actively try to assist in whatever way,
shape or form we could. For me, it’s just about being a human being. […]
To go and visit was the first thing for us to do –to say, “oh my God. Sorry!
What do you need?” ’

In deciding to visit detention, Hannah and her friends –like many of the participants
in this study –were acting on a basic human impulse to reach out to the suffering
other. Yet in extending the hand of friendship, they were also taking a stance on what
had become one of Australia’s most polarizing political issues.

2001 had brought so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ to the forefront of Australia’s political
debate. In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, Australian
Prime Minister John Howard had campaigned for re-election on a platform of border
protection and national security. Refugees and asylum seekers, travelling to Australia
by boat in search of safety, were portrayed by politicians and the media as criminals
and potential terrorists. For Hannah and others like her, this rhetoric obscured a more
fundamental truth. These vilified strangers were people who had come to Australia
for help and were instead being punished.
Despite the hundreds of detainees who have come in and out of Hannah’s life since
2002, she still recalls her first visit to Maribyrnong IDC.

‘I went with a friend who also still visits today –17 years later –and we’re
friends with the two men that we met on that first day. One of our friends is
married to one and we still see those two men. They were strong men. They
were activists from their countries. One was a journalist and one was a human
rights activist in his country as well, and they were doing work inside the
centre –lots of casework for the more vulnerable people in there.’

The stereotypes and political tropes that are so often applied to refugees and asylum
seekers, Hannah stresses, are far from accurate. Refugees and asylum seekers are not
‘illegals’ or criminals, but neither are they helpless victims or “some kind of innocent
perfect people”. They are fellow human beings. And the conditions Australia has
subjected them to have been nothing short of torturous.

***

The imperative to act

Australia is by no means alone in imprisoning asylum seekers. In the last
two decades, wealthy countries across the globe have adopted immigration
detention policies to deter forced migrants from seeking their help (Nethery
and Silverman, 2015). The detention of unauthorized immigrants, including
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people seeking asylum, is now the norm in the US, the UK and most of
Europe (The Migration Observatory, 2020). Between 2009 and 2019, the
number of people in held detention in the UK fluctuated between 24,000
and 32,000 per year (The Migration Observatory, 2020). France alone has
22 Administrative Detention Centres which in 2017 held 46,800 people,
including 2,797 minors (Global Detention Project, 2018). In 2016 the
US detained 44,270 asylum seekers as part of a larger cohort of 300,000
immigration detainees (Global Detention Project, 2016).
Despite this ubiquity, Australia’s detention policies are harsh by
international standards. Australia is the only country in the world with a
policy of indefinite mandatory detention, meaning all non-citizens in the
country without a valid visa are automatically detained for an indefinite

duration –until they are removed from the country or granted a visa (AHRC,
2017a). Australia’s policies have regularly been condemned by international
human rights organizations. Notable critics of Australia’s regime include
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (Al Hussein, 2014), the UN
Committee against Torture (2014), the UN Human Rights Council (2016)
and the International Criminal Court (Stayner, 2020).
Nonetheless, Australia has maintained its commitment to indefinite
mandatory detention for over three decades. Successive governments
have been willing to accept considerable reputational damage –as well as
staggering financial costs –to maintain the controversial policy. Between
2008 and 2020, the Australian government spent an estimated 20 billion
dollars on immigration detention (Essex, 2020), paying over $573,000 per
person per year to detain asylum seekers offshore and $346,000 per person
per year to detain asylum seekers in the onshore system (Asylum Seeker
Resource Centre et al, 2019).
For the most part, the Australian public has supported this course,
rewarding governments that take a hardline approach to the issue of ‘the
boats’. As political leaders on both sides of politics have engaged in a race
to the bottom to repel asylum seekers, however, a growing number of
Australians have been troubled by the cruelty being enacted in their name.
This chapter provides a backdrop to this book by offering a detailed
description of Australia’s response to people seeking asylum. It begins
with a historical outline of Australia’s detention policies, documenting
their development over time. It then provides an overview of Operation
Sovereign Borders –the specific policy that was in place when fieldwork
for this study was undertaken. Ultimately, this chapter maps the escalation
and securitization of Australia’s detention regime, explaining why visitors
like Hannah felt such a strong moral compulsion to do something to support
people in detention.

The evolution of Australia’s asylum seeker policies

From White Australia to multiculturalism

Xenophobia or ‘fear of the stranger’ has been part of Australian society since
colonization. Australia’s ‘settlement’ by British colonizers involved the violent
invasion of Indigenous lands. Throughout the colonial eras, Indigenous
Australians were viewed as a primitive people and ‘dying race’, and colonizers
understood the nation to be fundamentally British. Immigrants from other
countries –including Chinese who had come to Australia to work on the
goldfields –were also viewed with some hostility. In the late nineteenth
century, in an environment of ‘extreme economic competition’ (McMaster,
2002b: 281), colonists decided that excluding the non-British ‘Other’ was the
only way to protect their prosperity and that of the burgeoning nation. At

Federation, these protectionist impulses were formalized in the Immigration

Restriction Act 1901, which enshrined the ideal of a white Australia by limiting
non-white (particularly Asian) immigration to the country.
This preoccupation with keeping Australia white reflected deeper anxieties
regarding invasion and usurpation (McMaster, 2002b; Papastergiadis, 2004).
In seeking to control who entered Australia, settlers recognized not only
their own geographic isolation and (by extension) vulnerability in Asia, but
also the precariousness of their claims to belonging.
The White Australia policy remained in place until after World War II,
when it was relaxed to increase Australia’s working-age population and thus
ensure the country’s economic recovery and military security. This change
saw an influx of post-war refugees and immigrants from across Europe. Non-
European immigration, however, was still discouraged. Over the following
decades, immigration restrictions continued to ease. In 1973, the final tenets
of the White Australia policy were officially dismantled when the (centre
Left) Labor government, led by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, removed
the racially discriminatory aspects of Australia’s immigration laws and adopted
a new policy of multiculturalism. The change, however, coincided with a
reduction to Australia’s overall immigration rate to protect job opportunities
for citizens during a period of rising domestic unemployment (Jupp, 2002).
It was thus not until immigration quotas were increased after the election of
(centre Right) Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in 1975 that this new
immigration policy really took effect. When the first maritime asylum seekers
arrived in Australia the following year, multiculturalism faced its first big test.
The first recorded asylum seeker vessel arrived in Australia in 1976,
carrying five Indochinese refugees. It was to be the first of a wave of boats
fleeing Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War. The Fraser government
reaffirmed its overlapping commitments to protecting Australia’s allies in
the Vietnam War, enacting a non-discriminatory immigration policy, and
honouring Australia’s human rights obligations under international law.
As Immigration Minister Michael MacKellar (1977) asserted at the time,
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“[w]‌e are duty bound to assess [asylum claims] and if [refugee status] can be
demonstrated, provide assistance”. Holding these commitments alongside
its desire to retain control at the border, the Fraser government devised
a new asylum seeker policy with support from neighbouring countries.
The government asked regional transit countries to prevent asylum seeker
boats from embarking for Australia. At the same time, it sent teams of
immigration officials to interview those on route to Australia and accepted
qualifying refugees directly into the country. Between 1977 and 1982,
Australia accepted more than 54,000 Indochinese refugees from countries
in the region, thus minimizing the need for displaced individuals to make
dangerous boat voyages to Australia. It also resettled more than 2,000 asylum
seekers who reached Australia directly by boat (Stevens, 2012).

During this period, Australia had three immigration detention facilities,

located in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne. These centres were used only on a
discretionary and short-term basis, often to hold people who had overstayed
or otherwise breached the conditions of their visas. Only the Sydney facility
was suitably equipped to accommodate new arrivals. As such, asylum seekers
who reached Australia by boat were processed at the Westbridge Migrant
Centre in Sydney alongside newly arrived entrants from Australia’s formal
refugee and humanitarian programmes. In contrast to the prison-like facilities
that would succeed it, the centre was open and unfenced, although new
entrants were required to stay within the facility and attend a daily rollcall
(Phillips and Spinks, 2013).
In the years that followed, Australia’s response to people seeking asylum –
as well as the discourses that accompanied government policies –would
become increasingly hostile. Indeed, key Fraser government innovations such
as preventing asylum seekers from travelling to Australia would ultimately be
abstracted away from any human rights imperative and used not to facilitate
safe and orderly access to protection, but to exclude the unwanted stranger.
Equally, immigration detention centres, including the original Westbridge
Migrant Centre, would be reimagined as prisons as new arrivals were
discursively transformed from refugees into ‘illegal immigrants’.

The introduction of indefinite mandatory detention

In November 1989, several years after the initial influx of Vietnamese asylum
seekers had been resettled in Australia, an asylum seeker boat arrived in
Western Australia’s Pender Bay. It was to be the first in a new wave of asylum
seeker vessels, this time coming mainly from Cambodia. These asylum seekers
would not be afforded the welcome that Fraser’s government offered. Under
the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, the new arrivals were held first
in Broome, before being sent to the Westbridge facility in Sydney. In 1991,
a new centre in Port Hedland –a disused mining camp in remote Western
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Australia –was created, and many of the detainees were transferred there
(Phillips and Spinks, 2013). Access to legal representation and community
support at this new facility was limited, and asylum seekers were kept out
of sight, out of mind (Manne, 2013; McMaster, 2002a, 2002b). As Don
McMaster (2002b: 285) notes, physical isolation meant that asylum seekers
could be ‘denied adequate social rights and made vulnerable to intimidation’.
In 1992, in response to challenges in the courts (McMaster, 2002a), the
Keating government acted to provide a retrospective legal basis for its growing
detention regime. The legislation –which required asylum seekers arriving
in Australia without a visa to be detained for up to 273 days (Human Rights
and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2004) –was envisaged as a short-
term response to this specific cohort of asylum seekers, but also spoke to

broader concerns regarding the integrity of Australia’s borders. As Minister

for Immigration Gerry Hand (1992: np) stated at the time,

The Government is determined that a clear signal be sent that migration

to Australia may not be achieved by simply arriving in this country
and expecting to be allowed into the community […] this legislation
is only intended to be an interim measure. The present proposal refers
principally to a detention regime for a specific class of persons. As
such it is designed to address only the pressing requirements of the
current situation. However, I acknowledge that it is necessary for wider
consideration to be given to such basic issues as entry, detention and
removal of certain non-citizens.

In 1994, the government extended the policy, removing the 273-day limit
from the Migration Act and instead providing that unauthorized arrivals
could only be released from detention if they were granted a visa or
removed from the country. Australia thus became the only country in the
world with an official policy of indefinite mandatory detention (Phillips
and Spinks, 2013).
In the years that followed, Australia’s onshore immigration detention
system continued to expand with new facilities established in difficult-
to-access parts of Australia, including on Christmas Island1 and at remote
mainland sites like Baxter, Curtin and Woomera. Conditions at these facilities
were far from hospitable. A 2002 Lancet article noted that families at the
Woomera facility lived in small rooms or dormitories up to 500m from toilet
facilities. Many had no air-conditioning or running water, and temperatures
reached up to 50 degrees C during the day. There were minimal recreational
or educational facilities and children had few cool spaces in which to play
(Loff et al, 2002). The Woomera centre was originally intended to hold
400 people, but soon became severely overcrowded. Just eight weeks after
the centre’s opening, 936 detainees were held within it; by April 2000, this
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

figure had risen to 1,500 (Fiske, 2016).

In these trying conditions, incidents of self-harm proliferated. Australia’s
detention regime had received negligible media attention in the early years
of its operation, but Australian media outlets now began reporting shocking
stories of detainees sewing their lips together, engaging in hunger strikes
and suicide attempts, and rioting in the desert (Fiske, 2016; Tazreiter,
2010). Detainees, hidden from the public in these remote facilities, wanted
Australians to know that they were there and they were suffering (Fiske,
2016). As community awareness grew, so too did Australia’s asylum seeker
support movement. As Claudia Tazreiter (2010: 207) writes, ‘Australian
citizens became increasingly outraged and willing to act on behalf of others –
even of strangers –as overwhelming evidence of injustice was revealed’.

Howard’s Pacific Solution

The next major escalation in Australia’s response to people seeking asylum
came in 2001. After years of simmering anti-migration sentiment, the
events of September 11 brought a new level of vitriol to the surface of
Australia’s asylum seeker debate, and a new level of cruelty to Australia’s
detention policy.
In the mid-1990s, Independent MP Pauline Hanson had been elected to
parliament on a fierce anti-multiculturalism platform and had subsequently
formed a right-wing political party called One Nation. One Nation had
presented itself as a party that was bold enough to say what ‘ordinary
Australians’ were thinking, even if this wasn’t politically correct. Hanson
blamed immigrants for increases in crime, opposed immigration from ‘non-
Christian’ countries, and denounced new Australians who failed to assimilate
into Australian society (Poynting, 2002). At this time, most arriving asylum
seekers were fleeing politically volatile areas of the Middle East. Some came
from Islamic backgrounds. As fears mounted regarding the perceived cultural
incompatibility of this new influx of immigrants, the Middle Eastern Other
was blamed for myriad social problems within Australia. As Scott Poynting
and colleagues (2004: 49) observe, the logic of racialization saw Middle
Eastern ‘conflated with Arab, Arab with Muslim, Muslim with rapist, rapist
with gang, gang with terrorist, terrorist with “boat people”, “boat people”
with barbaric, and so on in interminable permutations’. By 2001, the Middle
Eastern immigrant had been transformed into a national villain onto whom
the country’s fears could be projected.
In 2001 –a federal election year –the (centre Right) Howard government
made the decision to exploit and amplify these fears for political gain. A month
before the federal election campaign commenced, a Norwegian freighter,
the Tampa, rescued 433 asylum seekers from a sinking boat in international
waters (Mares, 2002). The Tampa’s captain requested permission to bring
the rescued passengers to Australia’s Christmas Island, which was close by.
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

The Howard government seized its opportunity. In a highly publicized and

politicized decision, the Tampa was refused permission to enter Australian
waters and armed Special Air Service troops were deployed to enforce the
decision (Lynch and O’Brien, 2001). With Australia and the world watching,
Howard (in Rundle, 2001: 3) declared that the Tampa asylum seekers would
“never set foot on Australian soil”. The government negotiated with two
small Pacific nations –both in serious financial difficulties (Nethery, 2019) –
and convinced them to take the passengers in exchange for remuneration.
As Glenn Banks and Andrew McGregor (2011: 233) explain,

The former Australian colonial territory of Papua New Guinea,

which allowed Manus Island to be used as a ‘human processing zone’,

and the tiny island state of Nauru (whose once bountiful supplies
of phosphate had long since been diminished by Australian mining
companies and used to enhance the New Zealand and Australian
agricultural economies) became sites to ‘outsource’ and ‘offshore’
humanitarian responsibilities.

A new militarized border protection policy –the ‘Pacific Solution’ –was

born (Spinks and Phillips, 2011).
Under the Pacific Solution, Australia’s migration zone was reduced to
prevent asylum seekers from lodging refugee claims at almost 5,000 newly
excised Australian islands, including Christmas, Ashmore, Cocos and Cartier
Islands (Phillips and Spinks, 2013). The government also legislated to send
any asylum seekers who reached Australia to offshore detention camps in
PNG or Nauru. A new policy of intercepting and turning back asylum seeker
boats in international waters was also introduced. The focus throughout was
on asserting Australia’s sovereignty and regaining control of the country’s
borders. As Howard (2001b) declared at the time, “we will decide who comes
to this country and the circumstances in which they come”. Like Fraser,
Howard saw the importance of a firm border and an orderly immigration
programme. Unlike Fraser, however, he did not provide safe resettlement
pathways for would-be asylum seekers.
The purported threat posed by Middle Eastern immigration was already
looming in the national imagination when, on 11 September 2001,
catastrophic terrorist attacks took place in the US. The Australian government
rallied behind its wartime ally, committing troops to America’s subsequent
‘War on Terrorism’. Closer to home, the government also prepared to fight
this war on its own doorstep (Marr and Wilkinson, 2003). Ignoring the reality
that many of the asylum seekers arriving in Australian waters were fleeing
the very regimes the US coalition opposed (Martin, 2015), the government
framed irregular migration as a defence issue and conflated asylum seekers
with the ‘enemy’ of September 11. Insofar as asylum seekers were entering
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Australian waters without authorization, Howard insisted (2001c), there was

“no way” of knowing whether they were terrorists. Defence Minister Peter
Reith warned that asylum seeker boats could be “a pipeline for terrorists
to come in and use your country as a staging post for terrorist activities”
(in Albanese, 2005). Framing the forthcoming election as a referendum on
national security and himself as a tough and decisive leader, Howard streaked
ahead in the polls.
Just a month after the Tampa incident and two days into Howard’s official
re-election campaign, Australia’s HMAS Adelaide intercepted an asylum
seeker boat as it entered Australia’s contiguous zone. When attempts to deter
the vessel were unsuccessful, a boarding party took control of the boat and
redirected it to Indonesia. Amid the confused telephone conversations that

followed, Australia’s Northern Command commander –and, soon after,

Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock –came to believe that asylum seekers
had thrown their children into the water. This was not correct. Nonetheless,
Ruddock briefed the media.

Disturbingly a number of children have been thrown overboard, again

with the intention of putting us under duress. [It was] clearly planned
and premeditated. People wouldn’t have come wearing life jackets
unless they intended some action of this sort. (Ruddock in The Sydney
Morning Herald: np)

Almost immediately, doubts emerged regarding the veracity of these claims,

but the government doubled down on its story. “I certainly don’t want
people of that type in Australia, I really don’t”, Howard (2001a) declared.
At best, asylum seekers were now portrayed as manipulative ‘illegal
immigrants’ who had ‘jumped the queue’ by coming to Australia without
authorization (Pickering, 2001; Klocker and Dunn, 2003; Gelber, 2003).
At worst, they were child abusers, criminals and ‘Islamic terrorists’ –the
antithesis of the (nominally Christian) Australian Us (Poynting et al, 2004;
Marr and Wilkinson 2003). Howard’s ultimate electoral win would change
the shape of domestic politics, bringing the issue of ‘the boats’ to the forefront
of the public consciousness and setting the tone of federal election campaigns
for decades to come.
There is debate among migration experts as to whether the Pacific Solution
was effective in deterring asylum seekers from travelling to Australia, or
whether the marked reduction in asylum seeker numbers following the
policy’s introduction was the result of international developments including
the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (Nethery,
2019). What is clear is that in the early years of the Pacific Solution asylum
seeker boats all but ceased (Hatton and Lim, 2005). In 2001, 5,516 asylum
seekers arrived in Australia by boat; by 2002, this number had fallen to one
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(Phillips, 2017).2

Labor’s new politics of ‘compassion’

With new boat arrivals no longer dominating the news, community
apprehensions appeared to recede. By 2007, growing segments of the
Australian population were awakening to the human and reputational costs
of Australia’s hardline deterrence policies. Other threats –including the
potentially catastrophic consequences of human-induced climate change –
were also taking a more prominent place on the national agenda. After
11 years in government, Howard was defeated in the 2007 federal election
and a Labor government was elected. The following year, Prime Minister

Kevin Rudd officially closed Australia’s offshore processing facilities in

PNG and Nauru (Phillips and Spinks, 2013). He did not, however, alter
Australia’s policy of indefinite mandatory detention, amend the legislation
that had made offshore processing possible or cease work on the high-
security detention facility under construction on Australia’s Christmas Island
(Nethery and Holman, 2016).
New asylum seekers arriving in Australia at this time were detained
indefinitely within the extant onshore immigration detention network.
The network had been through various changes in the preceding decade,
but now consisted of seven secure detention facilities (Villawood IDC,
Perth IDC, Maribyrnong IDC, Northern IDC, Christmas Island IDC,
BITA and MITA), as well as several APODS (AHRC, 2008). These
facilities were, in most instances, significantly less isolated than both
Australia’s offshore processing facilities and the remote onshore centres
that Australians had seen on their television screens in the late 1990s
and early 2000s. They were also, however, a far cry from the open
and unfenced facilities that had originally been utilized. Australia had
essentially moved to a network of prison-like centres mainly located on
the outskirts of its capital cities. In 2008 (p. 22), the AHRC described
the centres as follows:

Put simply, most of the centres feel like prisons. High wire fences, lack
of open green space, walled-in courtyards, ageing buildings, pervasive
security features, cramped conditions and lack of privacy combine to
create an oppressive atmosphere.

Despite these enduring concerns, Labor’s decision to end offshore processing

was broadly welcomed as a humane development in Australia’s response
to people seeking asylum. Indeed, Labor actively encouraged this reading,
adopting a new discourse of ‘compassion’.
Under Howard, people seeking asylum had been discursively constructed
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as a threatening enemy and cultural Other. They had become a screen

onto which historical and contemporary anxieties could be projected for
political gain. In an effort to redeem the figure of the asylum seeker, the
Rudd government represented people seeking asylum in a markedly different
way –not as dangerous criminals, but as helpless victims. The real enemies,
the government insisted, were not desperate asylum seekers but the people
smugglers who exploited their misery. As Minister for Immigration and
Citizenship Chris Evans (2008) stated, “[w]‌e recognise that tackling people-
smuggling, rather than vilifying its exploited clients, should be the focus
of government policy”. Where Howard had suggested that asylum seekers
were the antithesis of the Australian (Christian) Us, Rudd (2006, np) evoked
Biblical imagery in this call for compassion.

The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of the many which deal
with the matter of how we should respond to the vulnerable stranger
in our midst.

Rudd was trying to reverse the polarity of political rhetoric and bring the
asylum seeker back into Australia’s circle of care.
This notion of vulnerability was key to Labor’s rhetoric and posed a direct
challenge to Howard’s discourse of danger and threat. It also, however,
stripped asylum seekers of their agency. Maritime arrivals were not portrayed
as complete individuals, capable of the full breadth of human emotions
and desires. Neither were they recognized as autonomous people who had
made difficult decisions to protect themselves and their families in a regional
context where safe pathways to resettlement had been cut off or restricted
(Essex, 2020). Rather, asylum seekers were transformed into passive victims
in need of rescue, and Australia was positioned as their would-be saviour.
This construction located Australia’s response to people seeking asylum
within the domain of generosity, not human rights. It also afforded Australia
a position of power and control in relation to people seeking asylum, just as
the Howard government’s more punitive discourse had (Peterie, 2017; see
also Silverstein, 2020). In this way, Rudd’s discourse of compassion lay the
foundation for his party’s later reinstatement of offshore processing –this
time in the name of tough love.
Where only 161 asylum seekers had arrived in Australia by boat in 2008,
this number had risen to 17,204 by 2012 (Phillips, 2017). Australia’s stretched
onshore detention network had grown from seven facilities to twelve. Under
fierce attack from the opposition, the government experimented with a range
of ultimately unsuccessful policy solutions (including a 2011 refugee-swap
deal with Malaysia which did not survive a High Court challenge) in a bid
to curb the flow of boats and appease community concern. In 2012, with
an election looming, the Labor government reinstated offshore processing
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in a desperate effort to regain the public’s confidence and avoid political

disaster. Yet the government did not entirely abandon its discourse of
compassion. These harsher policies, Labor insisted, were needed to protect
asylum seekers from people smugglers and save lives at sea. “There is nothing
humane about a voyage across dangerous seas with the ever-present risk of
death in leaky boats captained by people smugglers”, Prime Minister Julia
Gillard (2010) said. Humanitarian and border protection concerns were thus
brought together in a discourse of paternalistic compassion, calculated to
appeal to all (Peterie, 2017).
Despite this discursive maneuvering and the government’s revival of
hardline deterrence policies to regain the public’s confidence, the Labor
government would not survive the next election. The year 2013 saw the

Liberal-National Coalition elected to government after a campaign in

which border protection policies again featured prominently. Following in
Howard’s footsteps, the government, under Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s
leadership, introduced a militarized border protection programme called
Operation Sovereign Borders. A new law enforcement agency –tellingly
titled Australian Border Force (ABF) –was created to oversee the programme.
The government asserted that asylum seekers arriving in Australia without
authorization would never be resettled in the country, regardless of whether
they were found to be refugees. Under the Coalition government, Australia
returned to the lexis and logic of the Pacific Solution. “[T]‌his is our country
and we determine who comes here”, Abbott (2013) declared.

Operation Sovereign Borders

The anguish offshore
The empirical research that informs this book was undertaken between 2015
and 2020. That is, at a time when people seeking asylum in Australia were
deterred and detained under Operation Sovereign Borders. While some
interviewees had been visiting detention since the turn of the century, most
commenced their visits in the early or mid-2010s, around the time that
Operation Sovereign Borders commenced. Hardening government policies
and discourses, together with horror stories from offshore, were key catalysts
in many visitors’ decisions.
The harms associated with offshore processing were apparent during the
Howard years, but under Operation Sovereign Borders, evidence of atrocious
conditions at these centres mounted. In one widely reported incident in
February 2014, dozens of men detained by Australia on PNG’s Manus Island
were assaulted by police, security guards and facility employees after protests
turned violent. Some asylum seekers ‘taking shelter in their bedrooms
were dragged outside to be beaten’ (AHRC, 2017a: 36). Seventy detainees
sustained injuries during the attacks, and Iranian asylum seeker Reza Berati
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was beaten to death (Essex, 2020). Two centre employees were subsequently
convicted for Berati’s murder, although the judge in the case intimated that
other culprits may have escaped without charge (Tlozek, 2016).
A 2015 inquiry added to this picture of violence and abuse. It substantiated
several specific allegations of rape at Australia’s Nauru processing centre
and found that instances of sexual abuse at the facility were underreported
(Moss, 2015). The following year, a leaked cache of more than 2,000
incident reports revealed the true extent of the problem. These ‘Nauru
Files’ highlighted widespread self-harm and trauma at the Nauru facility, as
well as endemic levels of sexual assault, particularly against young asylum
seeker women. Perhaps most alarmingly, over half of the reported incidents
involved children. There were seven reports of sexual assaults on children,

59 reports of other assaults on children and 30 reports of self-harm involving

children (Farrell et al,, 2016).
As rates of physical and psychological illness at the Nauru and PNG centres
rose, there was also concern that Australian authorities were overriding
clinical recommendations to deny sick detainees access to emergency medical
treatment in Australia (Neil and Peterie Forthcoming). Several detainees died
after being denied emergency transfers to Australia. In 2014, for example,
Hamid Kehazaei –a 24-year-old Iranian asylum seeker at the Manus Island
facility –sought treatment for a small skin lesion and flu-like symptoms, both
caused by a common tropical infection. The Manus Island facility clinic did
not have the necessary antibiotics to treat the infection and Mr Kehazaei’s
condition deteriorated. Treating doctors sought permission to transfer their
patient to Australia, but the Immigration Department3 rejected the request.
Two days after the original request was made, Mr Kehazaei –now septic
and semi-conscious –was moved to a hospital in PNG’s Port Moresby. Mr
Kehazaei’s condition was misdiagnosed and mistreated and he suffered a series
of major heart attacks. By the time he was granted transfer to Australia, Mr
Kehazaei was severely brain damaged with multiple organ failure (Doherty,
2018a; 2018b). The coroner who investigated Mr Kehazaei’s death found the
Australian government responsible, noting that ‘multiple errors’ and ‘systemic
failures’ had led to his entirely preventable death (Ryan in Doherty, 2018a).
In another incident in 2016, Iranian refugee Omid Masoumali died after
self-immolating on Nauru. An inquest into the 23-year-old’s death found
that Mr Masoumali would have had a 90 to 95 per cent chance of surviving
if he had been immediately transferred to Australia for medical treatment.
Instead, he was not evacuated to Brisbane until 30 hours later, where he died
from his injuries (Vujkovic, 2019). As the UN Human Rights Committee
summarized in late 2017, the PNG and Nauru facilities were characterized
by ‘inadequate mental health services, […] serious safety issues and instances
of assault, sexual abuse, self-harm and suspicious deaths’. Detained refugees
and asylum seekers were simultaneously being harmed and being denied
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appropriate health care to treat their physical and psychological injuries.

The onshore system

Given the horrors occurring offshore, it is unsurprising that –insofar as
immigration detention was discussed in Australia –media and community
attention during this time overwhelmingly focused on the situation offshore.
Nonetheless, Australia’s onshore immigration detention system continued to
operate, albeit accommodating significantly fewer asylum seekers than it had
in the past. In January 2013, some 5,697 people were detained onshore in
Australia; around 96 per cent of this cohort were asylum seekers (Department
of Immigration and Citizenship, 2013). Five years later, in January 2018,

the onshore detention population had fallen to 1,287 people, of whom only
25.9 per cent were asylum seekers (Department of Home Affairs, 2018a).4
These changes were largely a consequence of new maritime asylum seekers
(insofar as boats were still arriving in Australia) being sent offshore to PNG
or Nauru for processing. It also, however, reflected government efforts to
release children and their families from secure detention facilities in the
face of mounting public concern regarding the physical and psychological
suffering experienced by children at these centres.
Given this reduced demand, numerous onshore detention centres
were closed during this period. When Operation Sovereign Borders
commenced, twelve immigration detention facilities were in operation in
Australia: Christmas Island IDC, Curtin IDC, Maribyrnong IDC, Northern
IDC, Perth IDC, Scherger IDC, Villawood IDC, Wickham Point IDC,
Yongah Hill IDC, AITA, BITA and MITA. This fell to between six and nine
facilities during the years that this study was undertaken: Christmas Island
IDC, Perth IDC, Villawood IDC, Wickham Point IDC, Yongah Hill IDC,
Maribyrnong IDC, AITA, BITA and MITA. Wickham Point IDC ceased
operation in 2016, while Maribyrnong IDC, which had been recognized
as one of the most violent in Australia (Hashman et al, 2016), was officially
closed at the end of 2018. Christmas Island IDC, the most isolated facility
in the onshore network, was closed in October 2018 but reopened the
following year, purportedly to discourage offshore detainees who viewed
the onshore system as comparatively comfortable from seeking unnecessary
medical transfers to Australia (Ryan, 2020). Various APODs were also
used throughout this period, including Kangaroo Point Central Hotel and
Apartments in Brisbane and the Mantra Bell City Hotel in Melbourne.
While the number of asylum seekers detained onshore fell dramatically
under Operation Sovereign Borders, new detainees were still entering the
network during this time. Many of these individuals entered detention after
having spent months or years living in the Australian community. They
were detained following adverse legal decisions surrounding their refugee
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claims, or because they had breached a condition of their visas or community

detention. In one case, which received widespread media attention, a Sri
Lankan Tamil couple with two young Australian-born daughters were
detained after four years living in the small Queensland town of Biloela. ‘The
Biloela family’ as they became known, had become valued members of the
Biloela community, with husband Nades working at the local abattoir, wife
Priya cooking curries for staff at the town’s hospital, and daughters Kopika
and Tharunicaa forming friendships with local children. In March 2018,
the family was re-detained in a dawn house raid. Their refugee claims had
been rejected. A last-minute legal injunction prevented their deportation,
and the family spent years in secure detention facilities –first in Melbourne
and later on Christmas Island –as they fought their deportation.

Medical evacuations
In addition to housing people like Nades and Priya, Australia’s onshore
detention facilities were used to accommodate offshore detainees who
had been brought to Australia for medical treatment, as well as any family
members who accompanied them. As noted above, the process of gaining
medical transfer to Australia was deeply flawed, and many detainees were
irrevocably harmed because of their inability to access adequate and timely
health care. Treating doctors in PNG and Nauru regularly requested their
patients’ medical transfer to Australia, but transfer decisions were made by
bureaucrats within the Immigration Department who had no obligation
to heed medical advice. Nonetheless, between November 2012 and June
2018, some 126 detainees from PNG and 376 detainees from Nauru were
transferred to Australia for medical care, in some cases as a direct result of
legal challenges (Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA), 2019).
At this time, medical transferees were typically accommodated in
immigration detention facilities or treated at nearby hospitals which had
been designated as APODs. Numerous community visitors to facilities
like BITA visited sick detainees at their local hospitals or supported
transferees’ accompanying family members at the detention centres
themselves. In theory, these medical evacuees would be returned offshore
at the conclusion of their treatment, and in some cases this did occur. In
2015, for instance, 245 people were transferred to Australia and 176 were
returned offshore; by 2016, however, rates of returns were decreasing
(Department of Home Affairs, 2020). In one harrowing incident
in 2016, a 21-year-old Somali woman self-immolated after she was
returned to Nauru following medical treatment in Brisbane (Doherty
and Davidson, 2016). In another case earlier the same year, doctors at
a Brisbane hospital refused to discharge a 12-month-old asylum seeker
baby amidst fears she would be returned to Nauru upon her release. “As
is the case with every child who presents at the hospital, this patient will
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only be discharged once a suitable home environment is identified”,

a hospital spokesperson explained at the time (in Doherty, 2016). As
the years progressed, lawyers sought legal injunctions to prevent their
clients being expelled from Australia and returns became rare. In 2018,
420 people were transferred to Australia for medical treatment but fewer
than five were returned.
In 2019, the medical transfer process underwent a significant change.
A 2018 by-election in the conservative federal electorate of Wentworth
had seen former president of the Australian Medical Association Professor
Kerryn Phelps elected as an independent MP, tipping the balance of
power in parliament. Phelps had run for office on a platform of economic
conservatism and social justice, including climate action and refugee rights.

Soon after her election, the Home Affairs Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous
Measures) Act 2019 or ‘medevac’ bill was passed into law with Phelps’ support.
The law fundamentally altered the medical transfer process for refugees
and asylum seekers in PNG and Nauru, ensuring that medical advice was
prioritized over political considerations in all decisions. As the Senate Legal
and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee (2019: 5) reported at the
time, the law required that before a detainee and any accompanying family
members could be transferred to Australia, two treating doctors had to advise
the Immigration Department that:

a transitory person requires medical or psychiatric assessment or

treatment, and; they are not receiving such treatment in the relevant
regional processing country; and it is necessary for them to be
transferred to Australia for such assessment or treatment.

Once the treating doctors had made this recommendation, the minister
had 72 hours to approve or refuse this recommendation. Refusals could
only be made if the minister reasonably believed a transfer was not
medically necessary, in which case the decision would be referred to a
panel of medical experts for independent judgement; or because of a
security threat posed by the specific individual in question. 192 people
were transferred to Australia under the law’s provisions, before the
government –having made a secret deal with an independent senator –
repealed the law in December 2019.
Medevac’s repeal was fiercely opposed by Australia’s medical bodies,
who lodged submissions in support of the legislation, as well as by
Australian and international human rights organizations (Essex, 2020;
Neil and Peterie, Forthcoming). It was devastating news for the refugees
and asylum seekers still held offshore. For the 192 people who had
made it to the mainland under medevac, however, Australia would
now –at least for the time being –be home. As the Secretary of the
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Immigration Department, Michael Pezzullo, told a medevac senate

inquiry in August 2019,

There are currently over 320 matters before the courts which have
been commenced by transitory persons in Australia —those here
for medical and associated purposes —involving just under 1,000
individuals. Approximately 500 of these persons are now considered
to have an effective barrier to their return, and it’s anticipated that
any attempts to return the remainder would result in the initiation of
legal proceedings. What has commenced as medical transfer actions
under various sections of the act has, over time, been transformed into
legal blocking actions to keep these persons in Australia, irrespective

of their medical status. (Pezzullo in Commonwealth of Australia,

2019: 14)

Australia’s various medical transfer processes thus saw hundreds of refugees

and asylum seekers absorbed into the onshore system. While families with
children were generally offered community alternatives to detention, many
single men –including those who had already been found to be refugees –
faced the prospect of indefinite mandatory detention in Australia’s onshore
detention system. This occurred despite these individuals having passed
security checks prior to their transfer to Australia, which meant they posed
no specific threat to the community.

Support for people seeking asylum

Australia’s asylum seeker support movement has generally grown during
periods of policy escalation, when government politicking has brought
Australia’s hardline asylum policies to the public’s attention. This was true
throughout the Howard era (Tazreiter, 2010), but also continued under
Operation Sovereign Borders.
During this period, a number of detainees overcame the veil of secrecy
shrouding Australia’s detention system and shared their stories through media
articles, social media posts, documentary films, books and other creative
projects (Tazreiter, 2020; Rae et al, 2018; Rae et al, 2019). Most notably,
Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani, who was detained in PNG from 2013
to 2017, gained a large public following publishing regular articles in The
Guardian and on other media platforms. During his detention, Boochani
used his mobile phone to surreptitiously film a documentary (Chauka, Please
Tell Us the Time, 2017), and to write a personal memoir that went on to
receive widespread critical acclaim (Boochani, 2018a). Onshore, refugees
and medevac transferees Mostafa (‘Moz’) Azimitabar and Farhad Bandesh,
among others, also shared their experiences.
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Detainees’ activism was supported by a growing body of concerned

Australians. An eclectic coalition of actors –lawyers, academics, public
figures, health professionals, faith groups, journalists, human rights
organizations and third sector representatives –came together with detainees,
their families and members of the broader public to condemn Australia’s
policies. Doctors and other healthcare workers proved to be particularly
powerful allies as they used their respected status in the community to lobby
for policy change (Essex, 2020).
Like many members of this growing movement, the participants in this
study felt a moral compulsion to do something in response to this evolving
situation. Specific triggers and intensions varied from individual to individual,
and some visitors had pre-existing relationships with the people they visited.

Nonetheless, two main aims recurred in visitors’ discussions of why they

began visiting detention. First, visitors wanted to take a stand against the
government’s policies. To assert –publicly and unequivocally –that they did
not condone what was being done, often in their name. Entering institutional
spaces to extend the hand of friendship was about contesting the assumptions
that upheld the detention system to begin with. Where Australia’s policies
treated asylum seekers as criminals who deserved incarceration, visitors
wished to assert, though their actions, that asylum seekers were fellow human
beings and (actual or potential) friends.
In using their bodies to send these messages, visitors had several audiences
in mind. If Australia’s current policies were in place because politicians
believed they were electorally popular, visitors hoped their actions might
cause policymakers to reconsider their views.

‘[T]‌he only way that change of this type will happen is if the
government realizes –or believes, ultimately –that they’ll lose votes.
And so it has to come from the people. The pressure has to come from
the people.’ (Robyn, Brisbane)

Equally, visitors wanted to influence their broader communities by showing

their friends, family members and acquaintances that people in detention
were humans too. They hoped to cast a vision of a kinder Australia.
Another audience for these statements was the people Australia detained.
In this sense, the desire to take a stand came together with a second aim –
one of alleviating suffering. Visitors with loved ones in detention wanted to
show them that they were loved and remembered. People entering detention
without pre-existing relationships wanted detainees to know “that some
Australian people feel for them and are mad about the system” (Claire,
Melbourne). As Roberta in Perth explained,

‘The people in detention –it just struck me that it must be an incredibly

difficult situation for them without any support networks. And even
if all I could do was to offer social support it’s probably worthwhile to
have the detainees realize the government policy does not reflect the
way normal Australians see them.’ (Roberta, Perth)

Some visitors had particular skill sets that they wished to offer in the service
of this aim. Several interviewees came from social work or psychology
backgrounds and wanted to use this expertise to provide emotional support.
Other participants had worked with refugees or other disadvantaged groups
in careers as doctors, teachers or aid workers and imagined their professional
skills might be useful in detention. But in many cases, visitors had only a

vague sense of how they might help. The main thing, at least initially, was
simply being there and offering what they had.

Conclusion
For decades now, Australian governments on both sides of politics have
worked to deter and expel maritime asylum seekers. Australia has externalized
its borders, preventing asylum seekers from reaching the country by
intercepting their vessels in international waters or processing their refugee
claims offshore. At the same time, Australia has maintained a system of
prison-like detention facilities onshore. The detention system today is
markedly different to that which was in place under Fraser, or even under
the Keating government. The general trajectory has been one of escalation,
driven by political calculation. Detention policies have become militant and
detention centres have been securitized. The financial, reputational and
human costs have ballooned.
In spite or perhaps because of these strategies of exclusion and harm, a
broad asylum seeker support movement has emerged in Australia. Members
differ in their philosophies, backgrounds, faiths and affiliations and thus
reflect the diversity of Australian society. Within this movement, hundreds of
community members do the day-to-day work of visiting people detained in
the onshore system. Some visitors come from refugee backgrounds or have
pre-existing relationships with the people they visit. Many do not. What
visitors have in common in a desire to stand against Australia’s policies by
supporting people in detention through personal relationships and associated
acts of solidarity. Visitors’ experiences in detention –as witnesses, friends
and human collateral of this system –are the focus of this book.
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Theorizing Detention Centres

as Prisons

Elizabeth’s story
It’s an autumn morning in 2016, and I have come to the inner west of Sydney to meet
refugee advocate Elizabeth. Elizabeth is in her late seventies and is something of an
institution in Sydney’s asylum seeker support movement. She visits Villawood IDC
regularly and is the co-founder of an organization that raises money to support asylum
seekers living in the community. In recent years, Elizabeth has been in and out of hospital,
and she uses a walking stick to get around. Her mind, however, is as sharp as ever.
Elizabeth first became involved in asylum seeker advocacy work in the early 2000s.
As an enthusiastic traveller and lifelong learner, she understood the factors that pushed
asylum seekers to flee their homelands. Like many of my interviewees, she was deeply
uncomfortable with the government’s policies. “I understand why there are refugees”,
Elizabeth explains. “I thought, ‘what can I do? I must be able to do something.’”
Elizabeth had been reluctant to visit detention at first. She instead focused on
writing to detainees at Australia’s remote Curtin and Port Hedland detention facilities,
and made the spare bedroom of her apartment available to people leaving detention.
Elizabeth had recently retired from a long career in corrective services and was unsure
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whether she wanted to visit another correctional setting. During her career, Elizabeth
sat on various committees and prison taskforces, as well as the parole board. She also
visited carceral institutions regularly.

‘I was in and out of the gaols a fair bit for work, but I was also looking after
the half-way houses and accommodation for when they came out and giving
support to various organizations to provide support for the prisoners when they
came out. So I had a very varied job in corrective services.’

When Elizabeth finally decided to go to Villawood IDC, her fears were confirmed.
“I thought, ‘shit! This is like another bleeding gaol’”, she recalls. But once there,
there was no turning back.

In the years since that first visit, Elizabeth’s view of detention has not changed.
In addition to her regular Villawood IDC visits, she has been to Maribyrnong
IDC in Melbourne, and has supported innumerable people upon their release from
facilities around Australia. Her view of immigration detention facilities is that they
are essentially prisons. “Nothing is easy”, she explains. “It’s a gaol. Villawood is a
gaol. The other place is a gaol. They are all gaols”.

***
Immigration prisons
In 2014, at a Human Rights Commission hearing into the detention
of children in Australia, Commission President Professor Gillian Triggs
likened detention centres to prisons. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison,
who would later serve as Australia’s Prime Minister, took umbrage with
the comparison. “[A]‌re you suggesting the Long Bay jail is the same as
the pool-fenced Alternative Place of Detention at Phosphate Hill on
Christmas Island?” he asked. Professor Triggs defended her statement. “I’ve
been a practising lawyer since I was 22-years-old and I’ve been to many
prisons”, she said. “I know a prison when I see it. These are prisons.” (in
Yaxley, 2015).
Morrison is one of a plethora of Australian politicians who have pushed
back against comparisons of this kind. The Australian government has been
at pains to insist that detention centres are not prisons and that detainees
are not being punished (Hurst, 2014). Such assertions are not surprising.
To punish asylum seekers for seeking safety, after all, would be a violation
of international law (McAdam and Chong, 2014). People in immigration
detention are held without charge or trial, purportedly for administrative
purposes only.
Irrespective of these official denials, however, the similarities between
detention centres and prisons are stark. Professor Triggs is one of innumerable
international experts –including carceral scholars from across the world (for
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example, Moran et al, 2013; Moran, 2013; Longazel et al, 2016; Pugliese,
2008; Bull et al, 2012) –to argue that detention centres are best understood
of prisons. People with direct experience of incarceration in these facilities
also embrace this language (Tofighian, 2020).
The most obvious similarity between detention centres and prisons
concerns the security measures they employ. Detention facilities in Australia’s
onshore network were once ‘open’, allowing detainees some freedom of
movement (see Chapter One), but are now highly secure. Detainees are held
in locked facilities that they cannot leave of their own volition and are subject
to constant surveillance by centre guards. In many cases, the design aspects
of these centres ‘are indistinguishable from, as they have been modelled on,
Supermax high security prisons’ (Pugliese, 2008: 208).

There are also important overlaps in who is subject to incarceration (Bull

et al, 2012). Around the world, young men are overrepresented in carceral
populations, and people of colour are imprisoned at significantly higher
rates than white people (see, for example, ABS, 2021; Australian Law
Reform Commission, 2017; Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013;
Billings, 2019). Carceral scholars point to the influence of societal factors
on these demographic trends, stressing that underlying issues of poverty and
deprivation –together with the criminalization and disproportionate policing
of particular activities and communities –mean that already marginalized
people are more likely to end up in a carceral institution (for example, Ortiz
and Jackey, 2019). In essence, entrenched racial inequalities mean that young
men of colour are at greater risk of incarceration.
This trend is reproduced through Australia’s detention policies. In Australia,
people arriving by boat in search of asylum are routinely incarcerated, whereas
asylum seekers who arrive by air typically are not. The mediating factor,
here, is that air arrivals generally have visas, but this discrepancy is largely a
consequence of government policy rather than any failure on the part of the
asylum seekers themselves. People who arrive in Australia by boat generally
do so because safer air routes have been closed off to them; they come from
countries in the Global South where it is hard, if not impossible, to secure
a visa to Australia. Detention systems thus exist within a broader context of
inequality. They reflect and reinforce a deeply colonial international system
in which an individual’s country of birth significantly influences their life
prospects (Badiou, 2015; Smith, 2016).1 As Mary Bosworth and Sarah
Turnbull (2014: 93) argue, the disproportionate incarceration of non-white
bodies functions to reproduce ‘the “whiteness” of the citizenry and the state,
while naturalizing the illegality of non-white, non-citizen others’. From this
viewpoint, carceral regimes function to create and recreate hierarchies of
belonging along racial lines (Bashford and Strange, 2002).
A third similarity between detention centres and prisons that is regularly
remarked upon by carceral scholars concerns the private management
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of these facilities. The privatization of incarceration is a growing trend

internationally, such that many prisons are now run by private contractors
on a for-profit basis (Byrne et al, 2019). The intersection of racism and
privatization in corrective settings means that private companies essentially
derive profit from the incarceration of people of colour. Significantly, it is
not only prison contractors who benefit from the prison industrial complex.
Daniel Eisenkraft Klein and Joana Madureira Lima (2021: 1751) explain
that the prison industrial complex includes a raft of commercial actors
including those involved in ‘bail programs, community surveillance, prison
construction, corrections data systems, security equipment, prison food and
vending machines, transportation, health services, communications, and
prison labor’. While Australia’s prison population is small by international

standards, almost 20 per cent of prisoners in this system are held in private
prisons. This is the largest proportion of prisoners in privately operated
prisons in the world (Byrne et al, 2019; Sands et al, 2019).
The privatization of immigration detention in Australia means that this
system is beholden to the same economic imperatives that inform private
prisons. It again allows profit to be derived from the racialized, marginalized,
criminalized and ultimately commodified bodies of people of colour. All of
Australia’s immigration detention centres are managed by private contractors.
The onshore network is run by Serco –a company with extensive experience
in prison management (Bull et al, 2012). Across the globe, immigration
detention and deportation, like incarceration more broadly (Schlosser,
1998), has become a profitable industry (Asylum Seeker Resource Centre
et al, 2019).
These similarities support the claim that immigration detention centres
are effectively prisons, but it is important to extend this analysis further.
Detention centres look like prisons and are run by prison contractors as
part of a broader system of colonial exploitation. But they also operate like
prisons in the fine details of institutional life. This equivalence of practice
and outcome is the focus of this chapter, and the theoretical foundation on
which this book is built.

The pains of imprisonment

In most of the Western world, imprisonment is the default punishment
for serious crimes (Martin and Mitchelson, 2009). This has not always
been the case. In earlier eras, physical violence was the main form of state
punishment. During the Enlightenment, however, reformers advocated
for more humane alternatives to corporal punishment and the prison rose
to prominence. A key claim in the prisons literature is that this historical
transition away from the brutalization of prisoners was not a transition to a
more benign system, but rather a transition to a system that replaced overt
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

physical harm with psychological means of breaking and controlling people

(Foucault, 1995 [1975]).
In his 1958 book The Society of Captives, American sociologist Gresham
Sykes (2007 [1958]) showed that prisoners are subject to an interlocking
system of deprivations and frustrations. While these techniques might
appear benign to the casual observer, they in fact inflict deep psychological
pain with remarkable precision. The deprivation of liberty –the fact of
being physically contained –is undoubtedly a foundation on which other
deprivations and frustrations are built in carceral systems. But imprisonment
is more than just physical containment. There are also subtler mechanisms at
play through which harm is inflicted. Five deprivations received particular
attention in Sykes’ research, as key technologies in the production of carceral

pain. In addition to the deprivation of liberty, he identified the deprivation of

autonomy, the deprivation of goods and services, the deprivation of intimate
relationships, and the deprivation of security as key pains experienced
by prisoners.
In the years since its publication, Sykes’ (2007 [1958]) The Society of Captives
has been debated, cited and extended by scholars in sociology, criminology
and allied disciplines. Some scholars have suggested that late-modern prisons
entail additional pains to those described by Sykes and have sought to
update his model accordingly. Eminent penal scholar Ben Crewe (2011), for
example, has written at length about pain associated with the deprivation of
certainty in civilian prisons. The invention of the ‘indeterminate sentence’,
he notes, means convicted criminals are often sentenced for a loosely defined
period of time –for example, ‘two to five years’ –and given little guidance
regarding what they must do to ensure the earliest possible release. The
instability this creates is a source of distress. Other scholars have described
additional deprivations and frustrations as they have applied Sykes’ work to
specific prison cohorts –for example, long-term inmates (Flanagan 1980;
Richards 1978), youth offenders (Cox, 2011), female inmates (Crewe et al,
2017) and foreign nationals (Warr, 2016) who have unique needs and thus
find different aspects of incarceration painful.
Sykes’ work has also been brought into dialogue with that of other
influential theorists, most notably Erving Goffman (1961) and Michel
Foucault (1995 [1975]), whose work overlaps with Sykes’ in important
ways. Goffman, for example, observed that ‘total institutions’ (as he termed
them) subject residents to humiliations and degradations that erase inmates’
prior identities. This ‘mortification of self ’ sees even basic bodily functions
brought under the control of the institution. Official systems micro-manage
even the smallest details of inmates’ lives. From a Foucauldian disciplinary
perspective, these methods are painful, but also more efficient than any
brute use of physical force as they function to remodel the subject’s psyche
(1995 [1975]).
Copyright © 2022. Bristol University Press. All rights reserved.

As Crewe (2011: 512) observes, this work remains highly relevant today.

Prisoners continue to cite such things as the deprivation of liberty, the

misuse of staff authority, the threatening company of other prisoners,
being cut off from family and friends, ‘unremitting loneliness’, the
crushing of emotional existence and ‘institutional thoughtlessness’ as
among their primary sorrows.

The main point here –developed and refined through decades of research
in civilian prisons and other total institutions –is that prisons are intended
systems of deprivation and mortification that attack inmates at the deepest
levels of the self (Goffman 1961; Cohen and Taylor 1972). Prisons use a

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Introduction: Studying Immigration Detention 1

ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation

exist in its current form. Deepest gratitude to my PhD supervisors, Dr Susan

practices and their consequences on health, hope and relationships. Second,

Care-​based interventions in situations of injustice attract significant suspicion

and emotion were of critical importance to these people. I also began to

Visiting Immigration Detention

The veil of secrecy

community. Detainees in this system are hidden in plain sight –​held in

Yet rates of self-​harm in onshore detention facilities are alarmingly high

Immigration detention is a primary instrument in many general deterrence

as an element of the country’s general deterrence policy (Coalition, 2013).

testimonies help illuminate both the less-​obvious strategies through which

archival research, conducted between 2013 and 2021. Parliamentary Hansard

Figure 1.1: Facilities in Australia’s onshore immigration detention network

Perth Immigration Adelaide Immigration Villawood Immigration

policies. Wherever possible, detainees’ own words –​carefully gathered from

a first-​hand perspective concerning the realities of detention centre life and

Outline of the book

Chapter Two provides a theoretical scaffolding for understanding the

Chapter Seven documents the impacts of immigration detention on centre

Immigration Detention in Australia

Her desire to act, Hannah explains, was deep and instinctive.

The imperative to act

The evolution of Australia’s asylum seeker policies

From White Australia to multiculturalism

Federation, these protectionist impulses were formalized in the Immigration

During this period, Australia had three immigration detention facilities,

The introduction of indefinite mandatory detention

broader concerns regarding the integrity of Australia’s borders. As Minister

The Government is determined that a clear signal be sent that migration

figure had risen to 1,500 (Fiske, 2016).

Howard’s Pacific Solution

The Howard government seized its opportunity. In a highly publicized and

The former Australian colonial territory of Papua New Guinea,

A new militarized border protection policy –​the ‘Pacific Solution’ –​was

Australian waters without authorization, Howard insisted (2001c), there was

followed, Australia’s Northern Command commander –​and, soon after,

Disturbingly a number of children have been thrown overboard, again

Almost immediately, doubts emerged regarding the veracity of these claims,

Labor’s new politics of ‘compassion’

Kevin Rudd officially closed Australia’s offshore processing facilities in

Despite these enduring concerns, Labor’s decision to end offshore processing

as a threatening enemy and cultural Other. They had become a screen

in a desperate effort to regain the public’s confidence and avoid political

Introduction: Studying Immigration Detention 1

Care-based interventions in situations of injustice attract significant suspicion

community. Detainees in this system are hidden in plain sight –held in

Yet rates of self-harm in onshore detention facilities are alarmingly high

testimonies help illuminate both the less-obvious strategies through which

policies. Wherever possible, detainees’ own words –carefully gathered from

a first-hand perspective concerning the realities of detention centre life and

A new militarized border protection policy –the ‘Pacific Solution’ –was

followed, Australia’s Northern Command commander –and, soon after,

Liberal-National Coalition elected to government after a campaign in

59 reports of other assaults on children and 30 reports of self-harm involving

‘The people in detention –it just struck me that it must be an incredibly