The Centre for Criminological Research is hosting a series of seminars and events centred around the theme of ‘Carcerality’. Our third event on Wednesday 17 April will be a hybrid panel discussion considering 'carcerality and immigration'. We are delighted to be joined by Hallam Tuck (City University of London) and Dominic Aitken (University of Strathclyde), with Mark Brown (University of Sheffield) as discussant. 

This event will be held in the Moot Court of Bartolomé House, School of Law. If you would like to attend online, please select an 'Online Ticket' type and you will be emailed a Google Meet link beforehand.

Speaker information

Dr Hallam Tuck: 'Caring for ‘Criminal Aliens’: Race, medical care and the definition of political membership in US All-Foreign Prisons'

This paper examines how race and immigration status shaped access to medical care within a unique subset of US Federal prisons called Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) facilities. While prisons rely on physical force to maintain discipline, they are also necessarily sites of care, within which the state is obligated to keep incarcerated people alive. Under 18 U.S.C. Section 4042(a), the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is required to “provide for the safekeeping, care, and subsistence of all persons [in Federal custody.]’ In BOP facilities nearly all medical care is provided by BOP staff, and the provision of care is governed by Federal regulations. CAR prisons, however, are unique both because they are designed to segregate ‘low security criminal alien men’ (BOP, 2016) from US national prisoners, and because they are the only outsourced prisons within the Federal prison system. In practice, this has meant that the medical care offered within CAR prisons was provided by private contractors, and that the provision of care was not regulated by BOP standards. This paper traces how the differentiation of access to medical care on the basis of immigration status and race produced fundamental tensions between carceral obligations of care and the desire to limit the entitlements of incarcerated non-citizens.

Hallam Tuck is a Lecturer in Criminology at City University of London. Located broadly within the field of Border Criminology, his research examines how efforts to target so-called ‘criminal aliens’ for deportation have re-shaped the nature and practice of incarceration in the United States of America.

Dr Dominic Aitken: 'How do IRC Staff Understand Their Work?'  

Drawing on interviews with employees at Brook House (Gatwick IRC), I explain that staff acknowledge the presence of coercive power in their ‘immigration prison’, but routinely feel an absence of authority, and lament that decisions about immigration cases are made elsewhere by off-site Home Office caseworkers. I then analyse how employees speak about the purpose of their work, which they see as providing both security and welfare. I conclude that the twin realities of power and purpose, security and welfare, create a dilemma for staff, IRCs and the liberal state as a whole.

Dominic Aitken is a Lecturer in Criminal Law at the University of Strathclyde. His research is broadly concerned with criminal justice and migration control, and draws on ideas from both law and the social sciences. His main focus to date has been on coercive institutions, such as prisons and immigration removal centres (IRCs). He has published work on prison oversight in Punishment & Society, and has a forthcoming paper in The British Journal of Criminology based on his IRC fieldwork.

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