The carceral web: Transnational economies of immigration detention

This article maps and analyses the imbricated forms of corporate and state power that forms the basis of expanding detention regimes in the US, the UK and Australia, countries that have the largest and most privatised detention estates in the world. We propose theorising these relationships as a carceral web that entraps people, spaces, and communities. We argue that the web is transnational, sticky and elastic, made possible by the alliance between corporate and state power that produces carceral economies and carceral subjects. Harm is fundamental to the carceral web: we view harm as both intrinsic to the function of immigration detention and integral to wider processes of carceral exploitation and extraction by which corporate profit is obtained and state power is maintained. More than just adopting similar detention policies, the countries under examination have adopted a carceral logic, with its touchstones of deterrence and crisis, in response to migration and surplus labour. These logics are rooted in racial capitalism, and a historical racial ordering.