research in immigration detention is, therefore, not merely a Greek characteristic. In fact, this is a matter that defines knowledge production in this field. When Mary Bosworth started her research in 2009 inside UK immigration detention centres, she was the first one to have acquired such open research access.16 Her study of everyday life inside British immigration removal centres (IRCs), published in 2014, was the first national study of British IRCs. As governments guard these institutions zealously, force researchers into relying on other forms of data to create a base of knowledge around these opaque institutions (Bosworth, 2016). Closer to Greece, in Italy, for example, detention centres are largely inaccessible too by researchers and activists alike (although see work by Campesi, 2014; 2015; 2015 and Esposito et al., 2021; 2020a; 2020b; 2019). As Didier Fassin (2011, p. 219) states ‘knowledge of these new detention sites, at the doors of Europe, remains limited.’ Border criminology examines the convergence between criminal justice and immigration control, utilising longstanding ideas and approaches from the field of punishment and society (Bosworth, 2012; Bosworth and Kaufman, 2011; Kaufman, 2015). Crime and migration control are both intrinsically political and contingently politicised. As a result, detention centres are in part political institutions ‘through which we formalize and make real the character of democracy’ (Lerman and Weaver, 2014, p. 60). In other words, the decision to detain, despite evidence of the harm that these institutions produce, is a political choice (Bosworth, 2021). Immigration detention centres uncannily resemble prisons. As one of the detention officers I interviewed said to me ‘Look, the official name of this place is ‘special centre for hosting foreigners’. But in essence it is a prison. The difference is that we are dealing with administrative issues, we don’t have any criminals here. But yes, we imprison them.’ Yet, as the quote suggests, in not holding criminals, these facilities become conceptually incoherent. Τrying to understand them, academics have turned to the mass of literature on prisons (Carlen, 1983; Bosworth, 1999; Barker, 2009; Crewe, 2009, the pains of imprisonment (Sykes, 1958; Crewe, 2009; Hancock and Jewkes, 2011; Chamberlen, 2016) and its adverse effects (Carlton and Segrave, 2011; Crawley and Sparks, 2006). Prison sociologists build critical, analytical accounts on detailed empirical fieldwork. Therefore, this scholarship has provided border criminologists with Although there was one earlier study by Alexandra Hall (2012) of detention centre staff in one prisonservice run establishment. 16 26