Hubs and Spokes: The Transformation of the British Prison

Abstract

The foreign national prisoner crisis began in 2006. On 25 April of that year, British Home Secretary Charles Clarke announced that over the preceding seven years more than 1,000 ‘non-citizens’ had been released from prison without being considered for deportation. Clarke’s revelation prompted a media frenzy: ‘Home Office Blunders Left Foreign Rapists in the UK’; ‘We May Never Find Foreign Murderers and Rapists’; ‘Foreign Criminals “on the Loose”’. Even the relatively staid BBC ran a series of stories describing how ‘foreign criminals’, notably ‘murderers and rapists’, had been ‘allowed to walk free’. Ten days later, Clarke was dismissed. The Home Secretary’s dramatic departure provided a superficial conclusion to the prisoner ‘crisis’. Behind the scenes, however, the scandal continued long after the presses stopped. In the weeks and months following Clarke’s dismissal, the government initiated a wide scale restructuring of both its migration control apparatus and its prison system. These efforts culminated in a broad new policy on foreign national prisoners, which establishes special prisons for ‘non-citizens’ and deputizes prison staff to act as quasi-immigration agents. Dubbed ‘hubs and spokes’, the new policy also ‘embeds’ immigration officials in penal institutions and obliges prisons to hold prisoners beyond the length of their criminal sentences. This chapter asks how such an expansive penal policy came to pass and what it can tell scholars about the meaning of imprisonment. How and why did hubs and spokes develop from a heated political scandal? What does this story reveal about the relationship between immigration and incarceration? How do policies like hubs and spokes affect the purpose of the prison? These questions guide the chapter and, in the process, situate a relatively short lived political scandal within a wider set of concerns about the regulation of mobility in a global world. Drawing on a year of fieldwork in and around five men’s prisons, I examine both the origins of the prisoner ‘crisis’ and its aftermath in penal policy and practice. Ultimately, I argue that the prison is a key—and too often overlooked—site for migration control.

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