There’s a lady here, she is very good. Whenever you meet her, she will be smiling to you... even if you have something hurting you, whenever you meet her, she will smile to you and ‘Are you okay? You want to go out?’ and you will feel good, you will feel happy. Conclusion The development of the MQLD is at the earliest of stages. Having been administered in three centres, it needs to be rolled out further. The MQLD offers an opportunity for the centres and the UKBA to investigate issues and aspects of best practice in detention. Currently IRCs have to wait for a couple of years between HMIP inspections to get a detailed, impartial, sense of what their occupants think of the centre. The MQLD means that managers will have strong ongoing data to inform practice. It also provides the detainees with a forum to express their views and to feed back any concerns they may have about their treatment. The survey uncovered some differences in detainee perceptions of the centres on specific parameters. While it is important to acknowledge that comparisons of this kind are more difficult to make in the context of IRCs than in prison given that there is no equivalent classification system of the institutions, that detainees identified some diversity in their experiences could be used as starting point to think more holistically about Issue 205 the centres. Why might detainees in Brook House find officers harder to understand then they do in Tinsley House, when detainees in the former are more likely to have been longer-term British residents than those in the latter? Why might communication in one be more difficult than in the other? In its current iteration, the MQLD found more commonalities than differences between the three establishments. Asylum seekers across the board had higher levels of distress, and ex-prisoners in each institution were more critical in general. Likewise, detainees in all three centres and populations seemed to have a limited understanding of the privileges and incentives scheme and the varying reasons for removal from association (R40 vs. R42). Detainees, no matter where they were housed, differentiated starkly between custodial staff and immigration staff, trusting the former but not the latter, while in all three places it found a worrying gap between those detainees who had been placed on an ACDT relative to the numbers who reported suicidal thoughts on the HSCL-D. The issues faced by the men and women in detention are complex and need to be understood in more depth. Future studies are needed on the different stages of vulnerability in detention, and individual strengths and vulnerabilities in coping with detention, depression and distress. A quantitative instrument like the MQLD provides an important starting point for these kinds of investigations. Prison Service Journal 15