Abstract
In Supply Chain Justice, Mary Bosworth offers a compelling and unsettling account of contemporary border control in the UK by shifting the analytical lens from sovereignty and spectacular enforcement of mobility to logistics, labor, and infrastructure. Based on extensive ethnographic research within the UK's outsourced immigration detainee escorting system, Bosworth traces the everyday practices through which foreign nationals are detained, transported, and deported. The result is a study that makes visible the routinized and bureaucratically mediated processes that sustain expulsion. In doing so, the book makes a major contribution to the study of punishment and border governance. Bosworth's central move is conceptual: she reframes deportation not as an episodic act of sovereign exclusion, but as the outcome of a supply chain. Focusing on Mitie Care and Custody, the private contractor responsible for detainee escorting, short-term holding facilities, and removal flights, she reconstructs the infrastructure that enables forced mobility. From data management systems and Operational Control Centers to vans, holding rooms, charter flights, and waist-restraint belts, border control appears as a distributed logistical operation rather than a singular act of state violence.
The introductory chapter immediately situates the reader inside this infrastructure, beginning with a richly detailed account of the headquarters of overseas escorting near Gatwick Airport. Clocks set to different time zones, shelves of prepackaged snacks, restraint equipment stored alongside paperwork: these details establish the tone of the book. Border control is neither hidden nor spectacular here; it is manufactured. The concept of ‘manufacturing the border control supply chain’ as introduced in the introduction to the book sets the analytical frame for what follows: deportation is sustained through mundane routines of counting, documenting, recording, transporting, and accounting. Across six substantive chapters, Bosworth maps the sites and circuits of this system. Chapter 1 examines the centrality of data and digital infrastructures in building what she calls the border control ‘logistical infrastructure’. The argument is persuasive: logistics is not merely about movement but about information. Property lists, risk assessments, fridge temperatures, and flight manifests become part of a data-driven regime that renders both detainees and staff legible as measurable units. In this context, bureaucratic documentation functions as both operational necessity and moral buffer.
Chapters 2 and 3 move to short-term holding facilities, including Manston and Dover. Here Bosworth develops the idea of the “permanent crisis” (45) on the south coast, showing how emergency measures become normalized within the supply chain. Temporary marquees and overcrowding are not anomalies, but structural features of a system designed to manage volatility. The description of these sites as “warehouses” and “cross-docking” hubs is analytically provocative. It risks appearing reductive, after all, people are not packages, but Bosworth is acutely aware of this tension. The language of logistics is not hers alone; it is also the idiom of managers who describe their work as akin to DPD or Amazon. The power of the book lies precisely in holding that analogy in view while exposing its limits. Chapters 4 through 6 follow detainees “on the road” and into the air. The everyday labor of in-country escorts contrasts with the emotional intensity of charter flights and forced removals. Bosworth carefully documents the training in “Home Office Manual for Escorting Safely” (HOMES) techniques, including her own embodied experience of being restrained during fieldwork (16–17) these passages are among the most powerful in the book. Rather than sensationalizing violence, Bosworth shows how force is routinized and justified as professional practice. The system aims to minimize overt brutality; it is more efficient when detainees comply. Yet the capacity for coercion is always present.
A key strength of Supply Chain Justice is its sustained attention to labor. Border control is not only about migrants; it is also about workers. Bosworth situates escort officers within precarious labor markets marked by redundancies, zero-hours contracts, and limited opportunities (55 and further) Many employees have backgrounds in warehousing, night-time economies, transport, or care work. Their employment conditions mirror those of other supply chain workers. In this sense, border control is not exceptional but embedded in broader neoliberal labor regimes. The book is at its most analytical generative when it explores this intersection between logistics and labor. By conceptualizing deportation as supply chain management, Bosworth shows how failure is built into the system. Canceled flights, aborted removals, and fluctuating numbers do not undermine the infrastructure; they are absorbed as recurring costs. Contracts allocate responsibility rather than eliminate risk. The private sector does not replace the state; it collaborates with it. Public and private actors meet daily, negotiate service credits, and share the mantra that “every removal counts.” Sovereign power is thus operationalized through contractual governance.
The concluding chapter returns to the normative stakes, asking “is this punishment?” Bosworth resists collapsing immigration control into criminal punishment, yet she acknowledges the legal and institutional overlaps between immigration detention and the penal system. The immigration detention system lacks the rhetoric of reformation or retribution and, as she states directly in the books introduction, detainees are deemed to “belong elsewhere” (22). Nevertheless, confinement and racialized differentiation are central to both systems. The book's subtlety lies in refusing easy equivalences between immigration detention and criminal punishment while insisting on moral scrutiny. The empirical richness of the study is undeniable: Bosworth draws on observation across 17 holding facilities, ride-alongs in vans, attendance at training sessions, and observation of charter flight preparations, over 50 interviews and 170 surveys. The methodological chapter is refreshingly candid about access negotiations, pandemic disruptions, and emotional strain. Bosworth's reflections on the ethics of observation, particularly the discomfort of witnessing restraint without the ability to intervene, added even more depth to the analysis.
That said, there are points where the analytical framework could have been pushed further. First, while race and gender are acknowledged as structuring logics of the system, their role sometimes remains implicit. We learn that officers differentiate between detainees along racialized and gendered lines and that ethnic minority staff report higher levels of distress. Yet a more sustained engagement with racial capitalism or postcolonial critiques of logistics might have sharpened the theoretical contribution. The historical section traces the legislative evolution of deportation powers, including the shift from imperial subjecthood to alienage, but the colonial continuities of logistics as a technology of empire could have been developed. A fuller engagement with how contemporary deportation infrastructures reproduce older imperial routes of mobility control through the sorting, transportation, and expulsion of racialized subjects under administrative rather than explicitly colonial authority, would have further strengthened this historical analysis. Second, although the book convincingly demonstrates how logistics flattens and standardizes, the perspective of those subjected to the supply chain remains mediated through staff accounts and observational moments. This is, in part, a function of access and ethical constraints, and Bosworth is transparent about these limits. Still, readers may be left wanting a fuller account of how detainees themselves experience and resist logistification. The supply chain metaphor is powerful, but it risks reproducing the very abstraction it critiques if not continually unsettled by detainee voices.
These critiques, however, do little to diminish the significance of the work. Supply Chain Justice offers a vocabulary for understanding contemporary border governance that moves beyond spectacle and crisis. It shows how deportation is sustained through paperwork, scheduling, training manuals, subcontractors, and performance metrics. In doing so, it speaks directly to broader debates in punishment and society about privatization, managerialism, and the diffusion of carceral power across institutional sites. For scholars of punishment, the book is particularly valuable in unsettling the boundary between penal and administrative confinement. It reminds us that coercion does not require prison walls; it can be operationalized in less spectacular and visible ways through vans, holding rooms, and flight manifests. For researchers of border control, it offers an empirically grounded account of privatized enforcement that neither romanticizes state authority nor reduces private actors to mere shields. Instead, it presents border control as a joint enterprise, a public–private infrastructure that persists even in failure. Ultimately, Bosworth invites us to reconsider what justice means in a logistical age. If border control is manufactured through supply chains, then challenging it requires attention not only to law and policy but to contracts, labor practices, and infrastructures. By tracing these circuits with clarity and restraint, Supply Chain Justice sets a new benchmark for the study of deportation.
