Immigration Detention and Social Harm

Dr Michelle Peterie is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies and School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Peterie’s research investigates the impacts of social policies and practices on individual and collective wellbeing. Taking a person-centred approach – and in close collaboration with research participants and third-sector stakeholders – her work seeks to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, families and communities. Peterie is the author of Visiting Immigration Detention: Care and Cruelty in Australia’s Asylum Seeker Prisons (2022), the co-author of Compulsory Income Management in Australia and New Zealand: More Harm than Good? (2022), and the co-editor of Emotions in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2019). She has been invited to give expert evidence to the Australian Senate, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Crown Solicitor, and her research has received national media attention.

Introduction: The Reverberating Harms of Immigration Detention
Michelle Peterie

Part 1: Human Costs

1. “If I Talk About It, I Start Crying”: Children's Responses to Parental Immigration Imprisonment in the US
Caitlin Patler, Gabriela Gonzalez, Monica Cardenas Guzman and Guillermo Paez Gallardo

2. Detention in the Community: Complex Ripple Effects on Young Adults in the US
Joanna Dreby and Tsveta Dobreva

3. Bonds Strengthened, Strained, and Severed: The Effects of US Immigration Detention on Family Cohesion
Mirian G. Martinez-Aranda and Tamara Black

4. Immigration Detention and UK Families
Melanie Griffiths and Candice Morgan-Glendinning

5. Moral Injury in Australian Immigration Detention
Michelle Peterie

6. UK Immigration Detention, Exhaustion and the Politics of Care
Alexandra Hall

7. Australian Immigration Detention and its Impact on Healthcare Workers and the Australian Healthcare Community
Ryan Essex and Erika Kalocsányiová

Part 2: Societal Consequences

8. Gender, Violence and Regimes of Vulnerability in Immigration Detention: A Transnational Analysis
Francesca Esposito and Mary Bosworth

9. Immigration Detention as Racialised Wealth Extraction
Emily Ryo and Christopher Levesque

10. Immunised and Indifferent to Indefinite Incarceration: The Corrosive Effect of Immigration Detention Laws on Officialdom
Peter Billings

11. Executive Control Over Immigration Detention Policy and Practice in Australia
Amy Nethery and Cassandra Le Good

Part 3: Ending The Harm

12. Accessing Information on Immigration Detention in Canada: Towards Carceral Transparency to Reduce Social Harm
Sarah Turnbull and Joao Velloso

13. Advancing Abolitionism: Why the Immigration Detention Industry Must End
Victoria Canning