The relationship between immigration detention and trauma is well established, and scholars have often employed Agamben's notion of the camp to explain the psychological deterioration that asylum-seekers experience in detention. Using Australia as a case study, this article argues that while the camp model is highly instructive in some contexts (such as Australia's offshore processing facilities), it is less useful in understanding facilities that are ostensibly bound by social and legal constraints (such as Australia's onshore detention facilities). Detention centres such as those on the Australian mainland, this article demonstrates, are best understood not as camps but as prisons. In making this claim, this article opens up a rich body of empirical and theoretical research regarding the operation of power - and, in particular, the infliction of psychological pain - in carceral institutions. In doing so, it provides a theoretical scaffolding for understanding how immigration detention facilities can and do inflict harm in situations where governments must maintain an appearance of civility and respect for the law. Furthermore, it provides a grounding and vocabulary for understanding outcomes such as trauma and mental illness not as failures of immigration detention systems, but as some of their core functions. © Author(s) [2018].

Pains of imprisonment Detention prison asylum-seeker Refugee trauma

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