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Indefinite immigration detention causes well-documented harms to mental health, and international condemnation and resistance leave it undisrupted. Health care is non-independent from immigration control, compromising clinical ethics. Attempts to establish protected, independent clinical review and subvert the system via advocacy and political engagement have had limited success.

The purpose of this study is to examine the following: how indefinite detention for deterrence (exemplified by Australia) injures asylum-seekers; how international legal authorities confirm Australia’s cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; how detention compromises health-care ethics and hurts health professionals; to weigh arguments for and against boycotting immigration detention; and to discover how health professionals might address these harms, achieving significant change.

Secondary data analyses and ethical argumentation were employed.

Australian Governments fully understand and accept policy-based injuries. They purposefully dispense cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and intend suffering that causes measurable harms for arriving asylum-seekers exercising their right under Australian law. Health professionals are ethically conflicted, not wanting to abandon patients yet constrained. Indefinite detention prevents them from alleviating sufferings and invites collusion, potentially strengthening harms; thwarts scientific inquiry and evidence-based interventions; and endangers their health whether they resist, leave or remain. Governments have primary responsibility for detained asylum-seekers’ health care. Health professional organisations should negotiate the minimum requirements for their members’ participation to ensure independence, and prevent conflicts of interest and inadvertent collaboration with and enabling systemic harms.

Australia’s aggressive approach may become normalised, without its illegality being determined. Health professional colleges uniting over conditions of participation would foreground ethics and pressure governments internationally over this contagious and inexcusable policy.

Existing quantitative research demonstrates negatively impacted mental health outcomes for people detained in immigration removal centres (IRCs) in the UK. However, there is limited qualitative research on the phenomenology of life inside UK IRCs. The purpose of this paper is to explore the psychosocial stressors experienced by people in detention, the psychological impacts of being detained and the ways in which people express resilience and cope in detention.

In-depth interviews were conducted with nine people who had previously been held in UK IRCs. Interview transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis.

Participants experienced incredulity and cognitive dissonance at being detained, and found themselves deprived of communication and healthcare needs. These stressors led participants to feel powerless, doubt themselves and their worldviews, and ruminate about their uncertain futures. However, participants also demonstrated resilience, and used proactive behaviours, spirituality and personal relationships to cope in detention. Antonovsky’s (1979) theory on wellbeing – sense of coherence – was found to have particular explanatory value for these findings.

The sample of participants used in this study was skewed towards male, Iranian asylum seekers, and the findings therefore may have less applicability to the experiences of females, ex-prisoners and people from different geographical and cultural backgrounds.

This study offers a range of new insights into how detention in the UK impacts on people’s lives. The findings may be useful to policy makers who legislate on and regulate the UK immigration detention system, as well as custodial staff and health and social care practitioners working in IRCs.

I discuss the case of Hassan Almrei, one of the five Arab men detained as suspects who have the potential to engage in terrorism. Hassan Almrei's detention arises out of a section of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act of Canada that authorizes security certificates. A security certificate permits the detention and expulsion of non-citizens who are considered to be a threat to national security. Detainees have no opportunity to be heard before a certificate is issued and a designated judge of the Federal Court reviews most of the government's case against the detainee in a secret hearing at which neither the detainee nor his counsel is present. The detainee receives only a summary of the evidence against him. I discuss this legal situation as a state of exception that is part of a legal structure in which non-citizens have fewer rights than do citizens. Two conceptual tools shape my understanding of security certificates and their use in the “war on terror”: race thinking and the state of exception. The five detainees are more than simply victims of racial profiling. Their Arab origins, and the life history that mostly Arab Muslim men have had, operate to mark them as individuals likely to commit terrorist acts, people whose propensity for violence is indicated by their origins. When race thinking, the belief in the division of humanity into those prone to violence and those who are not according to racial descent, is accompanied by the idea that there must be two different, hierarchical legal regimes for each, and when we begin to grow accustomed to places without law and to people to whom the rule of law does not apply, we enter the terrifying world of the colonies and the concentration camp. This article examines how a space where law is suspended operates in the “war on terror” and it attends to the work that ideas about race do in the environment of the exception.

The purpose of this paper is to explore supposed inevitable personal decline for long-term prisoners, particularly those serving a sentence of life without parole.

Using the prison records of a life without parole sentenced prisoner.

Findings suggest that prisoner deterioration is not inevitable in a whole life prison sentence.

Findings are based on one account, of a female prisoner.

Distinct services and support are required for those with a natural life prison sentence.

To date, there is limited research of prisoners serving life without parole, particularly the mental health implications of denying a prisoner future parole.

This chapter discusses the use of law and legal institutions by the emerging social movement seeking to end Australia’s policy of mandatory detention for refugees and asylum seekers. Through an examination of Australian inquiries and court cases alongside social campaigns, it considers the ability of legal institutional responses to identify the harms, in particular state and institutional responsibility, and the subsequent impact of these legal processes in inhibiting and promoting social and structural change. It shows how social movements are harnessing law and creating new legal and civic spaces in which to contest Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker regime.

This paper argues that the nation's immigration laws are being misused to craft a system of preventive administrative detention of immigrant men, predominantly of Middle Eastern background. These detentions give rise to imprisonment without charge for weeks and months, denial of access to lawyers, physical and psychological abuse and ultimately deportations without a fair initial hearing or the exhaustion of available appellate recourse. I argue that this expanded use of civil immigration detention is designed to weaken constitutional due process protections, bringing into the U.S. detention tactics adopted abroad under the rubric of the war on terror. This paper also highlights similarities between the evolving administrative detention system in the United States and longer-standing practices in Israel.

This study aims to compare the impact of Australian onshore and offshore immigration detention centres (IDCs) on detainees’ health and health-care events.

It uses data extracted from the Australian Government’s quarterly health reports from 2014 to 2017. These reports contain a range of data about the health and well-being of detainees, including complaints/presenting symptoms and number of appointments and hospitalisations. To compare onshore and offshore data sets, the authors calculated the rate of health events per quarter against the estimated quarterly onshore and offshore detention population. They ran a series of two-proportion z-tests for each matched quarter to calculate median z- and p-values for all quarters. These were used as an indicator as to whether the observed differences between onshore and offshore events were statistically significant.

The results suggest that adults detained onshore and offshore have substantial health needs, however, almost all rates were far higher in offshore detention, with people more likely to raise a health-related complaint, access health services and be prescribed medications, often at two to three times the rate of those onshore.

This paper adds to a modest body of literature that explains the health of people detained in Australian IDCs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to explore health service utilisation and a range of other variables found in the Australian Government’s quarterly health reports. These findings bolster the evidence which suggests that detention, and particularly offshore detention is particularly harmful to health.

In this paper, the authors explore racialisation through human-centric counter-accounts (counter-stories) to bring together critical race theory (CRT) and counter-accounting.

The authors utilise CRT to demonstrate the emancipatory role of counter-stories in (re)telling racialized narratives, specifically the narrative of asylum seekers who arrive by sea and are subjected to the inhumane and oppressive nature of the Australian government's policy of offshore immigration detention.

Counter-stories, as tools of accountability, can make visible oppressive forces and the hidden practices of racialized social practices and norms.

This paper emphasises that we are not in a post-racial world, and racialisation remains a fundamental challenge. We must continue to refute race as an ontological truth and strive to provide a platform for counter-stories that can spark or drive social change. This requires allies, including academics, to give that platform, support their plight, and offer avenues for change.

The authors introduce CRT as a theoretical tool for examining racialisation, opening space for a more critical confluence of accounting and race with potentially wide-reaching implications for our discipline. The paper also contributes to the limited accounting literature concerning asylum seekers, particularly in the use of counter-stories that offer a way of refuting, or challenging, the majoritarian/dominant narratives around asylum-seeking.