citizenry on the one hand, and Germany’s totalitarian
past and ‘guest-worker’ culture on the other.
Andriani Fili’s fascinating and disturbing paper
illustrates how far the objectification of migrants and
failure to see them as individual human beings can go
if unchecked. She describes a system of immigration
control and detention in Greece that is in crisis. It is hard
to believe that up to 120 people have been locked,
sometimes for months, in a space designed for nine
people at the Athens airport detention facility. It is a
sobering reminder that the inhuman, degrading and in
some respects literally deadly system that she describes
exists in the EU.
Ana Aliverti’s paper moves us beyond immigration
detention to a consideration of the criminalisation of
foreign citizens for immigration offences. Exploring
crown court and magistrate court records, she finds
that few migrants are prosecuted for immigration act
offences since dealing with them under the
administrative immigration system is often easier than
invoking criminal powers. However, those who do
appear in court almost always receive custodial
sentences. Given the range of immigration offences
that may be dealt with in this way, she suggests that
unless immigration policies shift, it seems likely that the
number of foreign citizens in prison will continue to
grow.
The final two contributions build on Aliverti’s paper
to explore the experiences of foreign national prisoners
in a variety of jurisdictions. Drawing on the work of the
Prison Reform trust in England and Wales, Francesca
Cooney argues that foreign national prisoners in this
country have suffered in the push to achieve
deportation targets. She poses an important question:
‘Is the prison service acting as an arm of the
Issue 205
immigration service … rather than fulfilling its primary
purpose of rehabilitation?’ There is some evidence to
support her position. The rehabilitation of foreign
nationals seems to have been de-prioritised partly
because of the mistaken view that they will all be
deported, and partly because of the somewhat
unethical position that reducing the risk of someone
being released into another country does not matter.
Finally, Femke Hofstee-van der Meulen reports on
her research into the experiences of Dutch nationals
imprisoned abroad. The problems they report resonate
to a large extent with those identified by Cooney. The
major difference is the high level of effective support
provided by consular staff, volunteers and chaplains,
who regularly visit Dutch nationals in over 50 countries.
The human concern shown for fellow citizens, both by
the state and by private individuals, makes a big
difference to Dutch prisoners, affecting their behaviour
in prison and after release.
Spanning several countries and multiple
jurisdictions these papers demonstrate both the
interconnections between migration policies and
punishment, and the range of perspectives from which
these developments can be considered. Many of the
essays raise tough questions about state practices.
Others suggest emerging good practice. As the
numbers of foreign nationals incarcerated in both the
penal and immigration systems continues to grow,
what is clear is that these issues need more sustained
critical attention both from academia and from those
who work with and for this population. We would like
to thank all of our contributors for their thoughtprovoking papers and we hope this issue will lead to a
more general discussion abut these matters within the
prison service and beyond.
Prison Service Journal
3