Description
This paper interrogates the impacts of processes of privatisation and financialisation on the global diffusion of immigration detention. Focusing on the USA, UK, and Australia, it examines the role private corporations and financial interests play in the promotion and spread of detention infrastructures and deterrence logics internationally. In doing so, it details how detention economies are imbricated with those of border security, policing, militarisation, and the prison, weaving a web of carcerality within and between these countries. This provides valuable insights into the mutual reinforcement of outsourcing and externalisation processes and the role of immigration detention in the transnationalisation of migration governance. Furthermore, tracing the international webs of carceral economies raises important questions about the entanglement of racial capitalism, sovereign power, and neoliberal statecraft. Finally, drawing on fieldwork with civil society actors, the paper concludes by asking how these insights might inform strategies of detention abolition and resistance to border violence.
