Spaces Of Detention Research Articles

The Resolution of Overcrowding as a Form of Convention against Torture Implementation to Achieve Security Stability in Prisons and Detention Centers in Indonesia

This research addressed the resolution of overcrowding as a form of implementing the Convention Against Torture to achieve security stability in prisons and detention centers in Indonesia. Errors in the calculation of prisoner numbers that did not align with the size of detention cells led to the phenomenon of overcrowding. In other words, such conditions could be deemed as torture against inmates. Despite Indonesia's ratification of the Convention Against Torture through Law Number 5 of 1998, torture in sentencing remained a major concern. The aim of this study was to examine the causes and impacts of overcrowding, analyze the phenomenon of overcrowding in Indonesian prisons and detention centers in accordance with the Convention Against Torture, and propose solutions to overcrowding as an implementation of the Convention Against Torture. The research employed a qualitative method with a normative legal approach to comprehend and interpret existing legal provisions and evaluate their implementation, thereby identifying the alignment between applicable law and its implementation. Primary data sources consisted of legislative regulations arranged according to the hierarchy of legal norms. Secondary legal materials included textbooks authored by eminent legal scholars, legal journals, academic opinions, legal cases, jurisprudence, and recent symposium outcomes relevant to the research topic. This study found that the Indonesian government endeavored to expand detention space to minimize torture and suffering that could occur in overcrowded cells, thereby facilitating the achievement of the goals of the Convention Against Torture.

Identifying the Layout of Retrofitted Rainwater Harvesting Systems with Passive Release for the Dual Purposes of Water Supply and Stormwater Management in Northern Taiwan

Due to its unique climate and geography, Taiwan experiences abundant rainfall but still faces significant water scarcity. As a result, rainwater harvesting systems (RWHSs) have been recognized as potential water resources within both water legal and green building policies. However, the effects of climate change—manifested in more frequent extreme rainfall events and uneven rainfall distribution—have heightened the risks of both droughts and floods. This underscores the need to retrofit existing RWHSs to function as stormwater management tools and water supply sources. In Taiwan, the use of simple and cost-effective passive release systems is particularly suitable for such retrofits. Four key considerations are central to designing passive release RWHSs: the type of discharge outlet, the size of the outlet, the location of the outlet, and the system’s operational strategy. This study analyzes three commonly used outlet types—namely, the orifice, short stub fitting, and drainage pipe. Their respective discharge flow formulas and design charts have been developed and compared. To determine the appropriate outlet size, design storms with 2-, 5-, and 10-year return periods in the Taipei area were utilized to examine three different representative buildings. Selected combinations of outlet diameters and five different outlet locations were assessed. Additionally, probably hazardous rainfall events between 2014 and 2023 were used to verify the results obtained from the design storm analysis. Based on these analyses, the short stub fitting outlet type with a 15 mm outlet diameter was selected and verified. For determining the suitable discharge outlet location, a three-step process is recommended. First, the average annual water supply reliability for different scenarios and outlet locations in each representative building is calculated. Using this information, the maximum allowable decline in water supply reliability and the corresponding outlet location can be identified for each scenario. Second, break-even points between average annual water supply and regulated stormwater release curves, as well as the corresponding outlet locations, are identified. Finally, incremental analyses of average annual water supply and regulated stormwater release curves are conducted to determine the suitable outlet location for each scenario and representative building. For the representative detached house (DH), scenario 2, which designates 50% of the tank’s volume as detention space (i.e., the discharge outlet located halfway up the tank), and scenario 3, which designates 75% (i.e., the discharge outlet at one-quarter of the tank height), are the most suitable options. For the four-story building (FSB), the outlet located at one-quarter of the tank’s height is suitable for both scenarios 2 and 3. For the eight-story building (ESB), scenario 2, with the outlet at one-quarter of the tank’s height, and scenario 3, with the outlet at the lowest point on the tank’s side, are preferred. The framework developed in this study provides drainage designers with a systematic method for determining the key parameters in passive-release RWHS design at the household scale.

Disability, Space, and Racial Injustice: Life Writing at Angel Island Immigration Station, 1910–1940

Abstract This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anonymous poetry composed by Chinese migrants and inscribed onto the walls of the men's barracks of the US Immigration Station at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, 1910–1940. Scholarship in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies has approached this body of work as a modern reinvention of traditional Chinese poetic forms within a US context. This study considers the men's barracks a protest space created under disabling conditions of confinement, and it demonstrates how Angel Island detainees critiqued the racialized and ableist systems of social control that operated at the station. The poets attest to undergoing invasive imperial regimes of bodily inspection and medicalized racial exclusion, and they document lived experiences of chronic illness, depression, and the anguished temporality of detention space. As corpus of disabled life writing by early Asian American and Asian diaspora writers, Angel Island poetry offers wider access to non-English historical vocabularies of disability as well as environmental and holistic understandings of embodied conditions beyond Western diagnostic models. As a built environmental archive and a National Historic Landmark, Angel Island is a significant cultural site for exploring how race and disability operate concurrently as social constructions.

Human rights and the ethics of clinical psychology

Human rights are key landmarks in the development of the law and protect citizens from the abuse of power. They also empower freedoms and can become a form of cognitive lens through which we act in the world. Clinical psychologists should consider carefully where freedoms are curtailed, especially in spaces of detention. How might we envisage a world where all living beings and things have rights?

Border hotels: Spaces of detention and quarantine

‘Border hotels’ have come to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as spaces of detention and quarantine. Despite the longer history of using hotels for immigrant detention, efforts to contain outbreaks have led to the proliferation of hotels used for border governance. Ad hoc quarantine facilities have been set up around the world acting as choke points for mobility. The use of hotels as sites of detention has also gained significant attention, with pandemic related restrictions impacting on access to services for detained refugees and asylum seekers. Inhumane conditions and mobilisations against these conditions have recently received substantial media coverage. This symposium initiates a discussion about ‘border hotels’, closely engaging with these developments. Contributors document the shifting infrastructures of the border, and explore how these sites are experienced and resisted. They draw attention to divergent experiences of immobility, belonging, exclusion, and intersections of detention and quarantine. In exploring different - and controversial - aspects of ‘border hotels’, this symposium theorises modalities of governance implemented through hotels. Following in the footsteps of the ‘hotel geopolitics’ agenda (Fregonese and Ramadan 2015) it illustrates how hotels become integrated into border regimes. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the material and infrastructural dimensions of bordering practices and specifically to the literature on carceral geographies, polymorphic bordering and the politics of mobility.

Surveillance and Security in Immigrant Detention Centres in Poland. An Overview of Key Technologies and Practices

Guarded Centres for Foreigners are the key instrument of detention policy in Poland. They are often considered as one of the key and at the same time most secretive forms of securitization and criminalization of foreigners. With panoptical practices of (in)direct observation and robust electronic surveillance the centres are tasked with containing and producing a (self)disciplined, knowable, governable and deportable immigrant, who can be swiftly expelled from the Polish territory. Building on ethnographic research, including interviews and photographic material, this article explores specific practices and technologies of surveillance in Polish detention centres by describing and discussing how they are deployed by detention personnel. It overviews different types of direct surveillance (e.g direct observation, counting, inspection), at the same time discussing the role of monitoring technologies, which have significantly influenced the practices and spaces of detention. The article concludes that further development of electronic surveillance in the Polish guarded centres may be inevitable and lead to further “panopticonization” of detention in Poland.

Spaces and Places of Detention of Foreigners

This paper focuses on the characteristics of the space and places of guarded centres for foreigners in Poland. It contains a discussion of universal features of the detention space for foreigners typical of the total institution, stocktaking of the centres’ space and the places which fill it, as well as characteristics of the ways of using the space and their determinants. The general perspective of the perception of the detention space focuses on its identification as a tool of authority and the execution of social control, domination and subjugation.

Malleable detention: The restructuring of carceral space within U.S. immigration detention

The expansion of immigration detention in the United States has been attributed to policy, privatization, and anti-immigrant racialization. This research extends understandings of immigration detention's growth by focusing on how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintains the necessary space to detain migrants during this expansion. In this article, I introduce the concept of “malleable detention:” the flexible strategies and methods used to restructure space within immigration detention. I base this concept on findings from an analysis of the T. Don Hutto Detention Center - a detention site that has remained open despite various abuses, protests, and closures. Using statements from ICE officials, intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs) between ICE and local governments, government reports, nongovernmental reports, and newspaper accounts, I find that the Hutto site displayed three forms of malleable detention. Detention was made malleable through repurposing non-detention space into detention space, maintaining flexibility in the detained populations, and reconfiguring contracts that helped keep detention open. Beyond the Hutto case, the malleable detention concept extends to detention sites throughout the U.S. This provides evidence into how ICE is able to sustain enough detention space that makes the U.S. the largest detainer of immigrants in the world.

Disrupting State Spaces: Asylum Seekers in Australia’s Offshore Detention Centres

The Australian government has spent over a billion dollars a year on managing offshore detention (Budget 2018–2019). Central to this offshore management was the transference and mandatory detention of asylum seekers in facilities that sit outside Australia’s national sovereignty, in particular on Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru. As a state-sanctioned spatial aberration meant to deter asylum seekers arriving by boat, offshore detention has resulted in a raft of legal and policy actions that are reshaping the modern state-centric understanding of the national space. It has raised questions of sovereignty, of moral, ethical and legal obligations, of national security and humanitarian responsibilities, and of nationalism and belonging. Using a sample of Twitter users on Manus during the closure of the Manus Island detention centre in October–November 2017, this paper examines how asylum seekers and refugees have negotiated and defined the offshore detention space and how through the use of social media they have created a profound disruption to the state discourse on offshore detention. The research is based on the premise that asylum seekers’ use social media in a number of disruptive ways, including normalising the presence of asylum seekers in the larger global phenomena of migration, humanising asylum seekers in the face of global discourses of dehumanisation, ensuring visibility by confirming the conditions of detention, highlighting Australia’s human rights violations and obligations, and challenging the government discourse on asylum seekers and offshore detention. Social media is both a tool and a vehicle by which asylum seekers on Manus Island could effect that disruption.

Battlegrounds: mobilizing humanitarian discourses in São Paulo detention centers

The text presented here, based on ethnographic research conducted in institutions of social control in São Paulo, such as prisons, juvenile detention units, and custodial and psychiatric treatment hospitals, is an attempt to examine, in spaces of confinement that operate as battlefields, the distinct uses that are intrinsic to the lexicon of human rights. Starting from the power struggles that play out in spaces of detention, we focus on two important vectors: (1) the activation of the discourse of human rights as a tactic of struggle, mobilized by adolescents who dispute for control over internment spaces; and (2) the continuum between the legal lexicon and forms of institutional violence, where the humanitarian discourse is intertwined with the practice of torture in São Paulo detention facilities. In this analysis, it is important to shed light on the distortions, uses and mobilizations that permeate human rights discourses, a prism that allows us to pass from law as a promise of pacification to politics as permanent war.

Torture in Modern Spain

This article explores how the notion of torture developed in Spain throughout the nineteeth century, becoming eventually a tool for denouncing state repression. It first considers torture in the early part of the century and the abolition of judicial torture and los apremios (any form of coercion used against an accused while in custody). It argues that the acceptance that legalised torture was inhumane helped to foreground another form of torture not yet named: government torture (the institutional violence used in spaces of detention and imprisonment to force detainees to confess and implicate others or as an additional punishment for prisoners). Hidden behind a variety of terms such as tormento, maltratamientos (mistreatment) and malos tratos (ill-treatment) it was not until after the formation of the liberal state that “government torture” came to acquire its modern meaning around the turn of the twentieth century.

Water Management to Enhance Ecosystem Services in a Coastal Wetland in Taiwan

AbstractWetlands provide multiple ecosystem services, and wetland hydrology is one of the key determinants of wetland function. Budai Salt Pan Wetland provides at least 11 ecosystem services, i.e. food provision, genetic materials, climate regulation, water purification and treatment, natural hazard regulation, pollination, spiritual and inspirational, recreational, aesthetic, educational and nutrient cycling. As the wetland is completely encompassed by dikes, there is no natural hydrological connectivity, and the wetland frequently dries out during the dry season due to lack of management and insufficient rainfall. In order to enhance wetland function, including habitat quality and ecosystem services, this study created a water management plan which mimics nature through water gate operation. We conducted experimental gate operations and evaluated the potential impacts on ecosystem services. The results show a positive impact on two of the ecosystem services, climate regulation and genetic materials, due to the increased moisture content and feeding bird individuals after gate operation. There was an insignificant change in the natural hazard regulation service as the gate operation tested in this study addressed issues of water supply rather than increasing detention space through draining. Through mimicking nature, sustainable water management techniques have the potential to enhance ecosystem services in wetlands. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Review: Spatial Stories of Migration and Detention: How Does Architecture Shape Punishment?

Spatial Stories of Migration and Detention: How Does Architecture Shape Punishment? Mebane Gallery, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin 5–21 October 2016 The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world and manages the world's largest immigrant detention system. Texas is home to more for-profit prisons, jails, and detention centers than any other U.S. state. As scholars and activists work to challenge this entrenched legal and social system, there is a great need for public displays that grapple with the system's complexity and connect historical developments to the present day. This exhibition contributed greatly to the goal of undoing the normalization of the “carceral state” by bringing the otherwise secluded spaces of immigrant detention into the gallery for viewers to experience. Created by Sarah Lopez of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and developed by Lopez and her graduate student curators, the exhibition was part of a collaboration of twenty university partners nationwide participating in “States of Incarceration: A National Dialogue of Local Histories,” a critical reflection focusing on issues of mass incarceration and presented as a multifaceted, multimedia dialogue intended to educate and provoke. One grand question seemed to resonate throughout the exhibition: How do the physical spaces of detention centers in Texas connect to the continued criminalization of migrants in the United States? …

Assessing Parental Fitness and Care for Unaccompanied Children

Despite an increasing visibility of unaccompanied children in the media and among policymakers, little is known about the experiences of unaccompanied children within and beyond immigration detention. Based on a three-year, multi-sited ethnography with migrant children and their families, this paper traces the impact of U.S. institutional sponsorship policies and practices on unaccompanied children and their families. The article delineates several intersecting institutional logics—the universalization of childhood, the pathologization of mobility, and the criminalization of transnational parents—that underpin federal policies and practices for the care and custody of unaccompanied children. The article argues that these policies overflow from the spaces of detention and shape young people’s help-seeking behaviors and sentiments of belonging following release from detention.

Biopolitics, borders, and refugee camps: exercising sovereign power over nonmembers of the state†

This article addresses the relationship between the concepts of national identity and biopolitics by examining a border-transit camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers in Germany. Current studies of detention spaces for migrants have drawn heavily on Agamben's reflection on the “camp” and “homo sacer,” where the camp is analyzed as a space in a permanent state of exception, in which the government exercises sovereign power over the refugee as the ultimate biopolitical subject. But what groups of people can end up at a camp, and does the government treat all groups in the same way? This article examines the German camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers as a space where the state's borders are demarcated and controlled through practices of bureaucratic and narrative differentiation among various groups of people. The author uses the concept of detention space to draw a theoretical link between national identity and biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign's practices of control and differentiation at the camp construct German national identity through defining “nonmembers” of the state. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork at the Friedland border transit camp and on a discourse analysis of texts produced at the camp or for the camp.

Re‐discovering goffman: contemporary carceral geography, the “total” institution and notes on heterotopia

Recent conceptual debates within carceral geography about spaces of detention have largely dismissed Goffman's micro‐level analysis of closed spaces and interaction. As a response to Baer and Ravneberg's 2008 contribution to this journal on the inside/outside of prisons and the importance of indistinction, with its critical view on Goffman as a thinker/scholar of relevance to studying carceral geography, this article aims to re‐engage with Goffman's Asylums in order to establish its applicability in terms of both theoretical and substantive implications for this sub‐field. The concept of heterotopia, introduced by Baer and Ravneberg as a neo‐institutional alternative to Goffman's theory, will be addressed in its relevance to understanding spaces of confinement. The empirical material is part of a research project about young women's experiences of closed institutions in Scotland, specifically prison environments, secure care and closed psychiatric units. Their descriptions of being locked up and their emotional, symbolic and embodied ways of understanding and coping include entangled encounters with closed or “total” space that show elements of spatial semi‐permeability. This spatial state can be understood as partially open, allowing the passage of certain elements while acting as a barrier to others, and it can be found in Goffman's account of the total institution as well as in Baer and Ravneberg's experiences of prison. The semi‐permeable nature of space in a closed institution – including its dimensions of inside and outside – does not become any clearer by postulating an empirical and theoretical juxtaposition between distinction and indistinction. An in‐depth engagement with Goffman's insights into the micro world of a closed institution instead offers surprising contributions to the understanding of semi‐permeable insides and outsides.

Policy Statement on the Incarceration of Undocumented Migrant Families: Society for Community Research and Action Division 27 of the American Psychological Association.

Policy Statement on the Incarceration of Undocumented Migrant Families: Society for Community Research and Action Division 27 of the American Psychological Association.

Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang CrisisElanaZilberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)

Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang CrisisElanaZilberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)

Reprint of: A healthy island blue space: From space of detention to site of sanctuary

Island blue spaces are associated with restorative potential, but few studies examine this proposition when an island׳s use has changed over time. We examine Rotoroa Island (near Auckland, New Zealand) where, for almost a century, the Salvation Army ran an alcohol treatment facility. The island׳s relative isolation was central to its mixed therapeutic and carceral roles. Following change in treatment ideologies, the facility closed in 2005. It subsequently re-opened as a reserve for recreation, remembrance and environmental restoration. Our analysis focuses on the enabling resources at Rotoroa across these two eras, in the context of different constructions of healthy island blue space.

Power in motion: Tracking time, space, and movement in the British Penal Estate

This paper tracks the impact of prison transfers (and mobility considerations more generally) on the spatio-temporal regimes pursued within the British Penal Estate. I argue that what appear from outside as static spaces of detention are in fact nodes within a network deeply crisscrossed by internal patterns of mobility and the problematics of time–space coordination. I explore the power relations that shape prisoner patterns of movement and highlight the distinctive states of deprivation they generate.