Incarceration, Disavowal and Ireland’s Prison Industrial Complex

Abstract

Ireland’s Direct Provision system condemns asylum seekers to a frozen existence in DP centres where private for-profit operators such as the international catering company Aramark are paid millions of euro to maintain Ireland’s version of ‘the prison industrial complex.’ Against this background, this chapter makes three interlinked propositions. First, I propose that as Irish state and society managed to ignore Ireland’s system of ‘coercive confinement’: workhouses, mental health asylums, mother and baby homes, Magdalene Laundries and industrial schools (O’Sullivan and O’Donnell, Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), they also ‘manage not to know’ about the plight of asylum seekers in Direct Provision. I suggest that asylum seekers signify the return of Ireland’s repressed, confronting Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence, with their own past. I also propose that we must not theorize residents of the Direct Provision system as passive victims at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done, but rather as active agents of resistance. Finally, and more broadly, the incarceration of asylum seekers must be seen as continuing the tradition of administrative detention of political prisoners in the north of Ireland and of the widespread Irish practice of incarceration. I, therefore, theorize the Direct Provision system as the current embodiment of the island of Ireland as two parallel carceral states, where the prison industrial complex has historically incarcerated 1 in every 100 people in the Republic and administratively detained political prisoners in the north. I conclude, following Angela Davis, by calling for the total abolition of imprisonment and incarceration.