“Doing head miles”: The Meaning and mental health consequences of immigration detention in the context of criminal deportation

Immigration detention is known to corrode the mental health and wellbeing of detained refugees and asylum seekers, and various studies have documented the policies and institutional practices that contribute to these outcomes. Comparatively little research has been undertaken, however, about the detention experiences of people who have been detained, pending deportation, after a criminal sentence. In this article, we develop a person-centred account of immigration detention as experienced by this cohort. Drawing on interviews with ‘501s’ in the Australian context, we map the contours of this cohort’s detention experiences, underlining themes of opacity, capriciousness, isolation, violence and self-harm. Bringing participants’ accounts into dialogue with global research on the ‘instrumental’ nature of mental ill health in immigration detention, we highlight the ways immigration detention is made strategically painful for this cohort. For 501s, we argue, deterrence is enacted through the deployment of carceral technologies that exploit this cohort’s needs and vulnerabilities, creating an intolerable environment that effectively forces detainees to accede to ‘self-deportation’.