Immigration Detention and Social Harm

Video Abstract for 'Immigration Detention and Social Harm' - Dr Michelle Peterie

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 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.