Immigration Detention and Social Harm: The Collateral Impacts of Migrant Incarceration

This interdisciplinary edited collection is the first internationally to comprehensively explore the harms immigration detention imposes beyond the ’detainee’. Bringing together research from North America, the UK, Europe and Australia, it shows how the harms immigration detention imposes ramify beyond singular bodies, moments and locations - reverberating through families and communities and echoing across time.

The book is structured in three parts. Part One: Human Costs examines the harms immigration detention imposes on people who are not personally incarcerated, but whose lives are nonetheless entangled with detention regimes. Part Two: Societal Consequences highlights the corrosive impacts of immigration detention at the societal level, including the role migrant incarceration plays in naturalising and perpetuating inequalities and injustices. Part Three: Ending the Harm interrogates the possibilities of detention reform and detention abolition.

This book will be a key reference text for scholars and students in the social and behavioural sciences who are interested in immigration detention, human rights and/or incarceration.

Dr Michelle Peterie is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sociology at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, University of Sydney. Peterie’s work seeks to understand the connections between our social and political world, and the health of individuals, communities and societies. She has previously held Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at the University of Queensland and the University of Wollongong and published widely on lived experiences of un(der)employment, poverty and social security receipt, as well as the reverberating impacts of immigration policies including mandatory detention.

Peterie is the author and co-author of over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, as well as numerous reports, government submissions and media articles. She is the author of Visiting Immigration Detention: Care and Cruelty in Australia’s Asylum Seeker Prisons (Bristol University Press, 2022), the co-author of Compulsory Income Management in Australia and New Zealand: More Harm than Good? (Policy Press, 2022) and the co-editor of Emotions in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2018).