Keeping up with the kladdkaka : Kindness and coercion in Swedish immigration detention centres

Introduction

As in many of its Northern counterparts, immigration is an increasingly contentious issue in Sweden. As Europe’s crisis in refugee reception unfolded – specifically in late 2015 and early 2016 – so too did a discourse of welfare and humanitarianism. While Sweden’s neighbouring countries worked to foment ‘hostile environments’ for the increasing numbers of people arriving to seek asylum, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven initially declared that ‘My Europe does not build walls’ (in Barker, 2018: 1). Civil society mobilized across parts of Sweden to offer blankets, tents, tea and food. Therefore, when border restrictions were implemented through passport regulation on 24 November 2015 ¹ on the Oresund Bridge – the 8 kilometre architectural feat facilitating free movement between Denmark and Sweden – it symbolized the ultimate disintegration of Sweden’s seemingly open approach to migration north. ² Developing on from this, this article focuses on contemporary Swedish approaches to the internalized control of people seeking asylum. According to the Ministry of Justice (2018), ‘the Government’s objective is to ensure a sustainable migration policy that safeguards the right of asylum and, within the framework of managed immigration’. Drawing specifically from the context of immigration detention, it unpacks the perceptively soft forms of control in Sweden’s approaches to immigration (Barker, 2013; Ugelvik, 2013; Ugelvik and Dullum, 2012). In all I argue that, although often relatively environmentally and architecturally unrestrictive, liberal rights-based frameworks are not compatible with the challenge to civil liberties that is inherent in the incarceration of people based on concepts of non-belonging and national identity (Anderson, 1991; Murji, 2018).

Method and scope of the article

The arguments set out below draw from research in two immigration detention centres – or förvar – in Sweden in September and October of 2017. As part of a larger 24-month project researching gendered harms in asylum processes in the UK, Denmark and Sweden, I gained access to two such spaces to undertake interviews with custody officers and governors working there, as well as one oral history with a woman detainee. In all, the project incorporates 74 in-depth semi-structured interviews with psychologists, support workers, border agents, refugee rights activists and other such social actors working with people seeking asylum. This has been further enriched by oral histories with women seeking asylum, which, at the time of writing, are still ongoing (see Canning, 2018a, 2018b; Canning, forthcoming; Canning et al., 2017). This article reflects predominantly on my research experiences in these two centres (which I have anonymized as Centre A and Centre B) and interviews with 11 staff working within them. However, the wider context of bordering in Northern Europe is drawn into focus throughout, placing this centrally but in a broad context of exacerbated controls, and the impacts thereof. Participants are identified by the prefix ‘S’ (depicting Sweden) and number (for example, S24) for the sake of anonymity as well as consistency across forthcoming articles.

As the title suggests, this article focuses on two primary mechanisms of social interaction and soft control: notions of kindness enacted by staff who aim to ensure that the experience of incarceration is not inherently unpleasant, and that the people detained do not view them as part of a system of oppression; and the embedding of coercive practices to ensure and enact the ultimate aims of the immigration detention centre. That is, ‘our primary objective is to make sure they’re here, that they’re available for their deportation’ (S27, custody officer); thus all actions, however perceptively soft, are peripheral to the very ontological existence of immigration detention.

Developing from work by Evan Stark (2007), Walby and Towers argue that ‘violence always produces coercion since this is one of the harms that is definitional of violence (such as fear, alarm or distress)’ (2018: 13). If we take structural violence as a state’s facilitation of suffering, then the non-alleviation of avoidable harms become a form of violence in and of itself (Canning, 2017: 48). Since, as this article shows in the penultimate section, incarceration always and inevitably inflicts some level of mental or emotional harm, then violence must always be institutionally present. Moreover, ‘as a concept it [coercive violence] is used to describe a range and pattern of non-physical abusive behaviours, including intimidation, threats, stalking, destruction of personal property, isolation, manipulation, psychological abuse, economic oppression, limitations on movement and restrictions on liberty’ (Stark, 2007, 2009, cited in in Walklate et al., 2018: 117).

This article thus centralizes this conceptualization of coercion, and indeed coercive violence as a means to avoid physical violence but as reflective of structurally violent politicized agendas. As indicated throughout, threat is integral to immigration detention because deportation is a constant possibility, certain yet uncertain. Although threats are not necessarily reflected in individual actions, the institutional threat of deportation is embedded in the very existence of such spaces. This article therefore aims to evidence the institutional use of coercion – primarily through manipulation and the exercising of soft power through kindness – as a means to ultimately avoid the use of power manifest through physical violence (Arendt, 1969) while exercising sovereign power through physical removal.

The Swedish context of internalized controls and spatial isolation

In 2015, as the crisis in Europe’s reception of refugees deepened, Sweden saw unprecedented applications for refugee status, reaching a peak of more than 162,000. The response was, as highlighted above, to heavily regulate the border between Denmark and Sweden through visa control and partial border closure (see Figure 1). As Figure 2 clearly shows, the objective was successful: applications fell by almost 140,000 in only two years.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Border security guards at Kastrup airport train station, separating Denmark and Sweden, in December 2016.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Applications for asylum in Sweden, 2014–17.

Although the externalized context of borders was in this instance unprecedented, Khosravi (2009, 2010, 2016) has demonstrated in meticulous depth that the practice of bordering has long been an integral aspect of Sweden’s internal approaches to the migrant Other. One key component of this is the asylum centre: ‘open’ camps where people are housed while awaiting review of their asylum application. ³ As of 31 December 2016, 63,063 asylum seekers were housed through the Migrationsverket (Swedish Migration Agency), with 51 percent living in asylum reception centre accommodation (Asylum Information Database, 2017). Thus many people awaiting asylum live in large centres in isolated regions, often with little access to urban facilities or support infrastructures. Some camps are as far north as the Arctic circle. Reflecting on his time at one such Artic camp, Khosravi recalls:

Despite all the differences (not least in terms of economic resources) between my Arctic camp and refugee camps in Asia and Africa, the logic of the camp, however, was the same: to place undesirable people outside the society. The camp meant both expelling and excepting refugees. (Khosravi, 2010: 70)

Although the structure and set-up of camps have shifted from warehouse-like camps to centres (Khosravi, 2016), I had many conversations with men seeking asylum in Malmö who had spent months in such areas, some closer to cities, others in the rural, icy North. Salaad, ⁴ from Somalia, reflected on the physical shock of living in −40 degree conditions, having himself been used to +40 degrees at some times of the year. Raif, from Iraq, recalled finding a fellow football player almost frozen, having collapsed from the cold while jogging home from a friendly match. Farjaad, an animated young man from Afghanistan, recalled his decision to leave Germany for Sweden. Having walked through Europe in 2015, he decided after five days in Hamburg that the extent of racism was too much to contend with and he called his sister in Afghanistan to tell her of his plans to enter Sweden. She warned that he could, but that the Swedish government were displacing migrants to ‘igloos and bears’ in the Arctic circle.

The urban legend of bears and igloos aside, Farjaad’s sister’s observation was not wholly inaccurate: the spatial peripheries of such centres can be as isolating and restrictive as the detention centres. Like deportation practices (Hasselberg, 2016; Khosravi, 2016), such spaces arguably facilitate the externalization of the migrant Other, albeit on a lesser spatial scale. Furthermore, and as Table 1 shows, the length of time spent in such centres averages almost one year: not an insignificant length of time for anyone hoping to rebuild a life.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Average duration of stay in reception centres, 2016.

Category of applicant	Average stay (days)
Person returning voluntarily	287
Person forcibly removed	688
Person absconding	388
Person granted a permit	464
Total average	344

Source: Asylum Information Database, 2017.

This form of isolation and uncertainty for the future can take its toll on the health of individuals, especially women with children who are further limited from travel or networks by school schedules and dependency (Women’s Refugee Commission, 2016). As one psychologist working with people seeking asylum and undocumented migrants across Skåne told me: ‘Isolation, a huge problem and the isolation tends to make people psychologically feel very much worse. We have people who have developed trauma by being at the asylum centres’ (S17).

Such experiences of isolation have the clear potential to be exacerbated in closed immigration detention centres. Unlike the use of asylum centres, Sweden’s use of immigration detention is relatively small but has continuously expanded over the past decade, and specifically since 2009 (Global Detention Project, 2016). However, Sweden’s reputation as being fairly relaxed in such practices is bolstered by two key points. First, Sweden detains comparatively far fewer people for less time than other countries, for example the UK and France. At around 3700 detentions per year, Swedish practice is dwarfed by the likes of the UK, which in 2015 held over 32,000 people in Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) despite similar applications for asylum (see Silverman, 2017). Secondly, the conditions under which people are detained are arguably less reflective of punitive prison regimes, with ‘softer’ architectural environments and fewer mechanisms for physical controls (Pratt and Eriksson, 2013). As Crewe contextualized in relation to prisons, ‘“soft power” is the core component of the wider form of “neo-paternalism” that characterizes the prison system of England and Wales. It is the sphere of power that makes unnecessary or precedes the use of direct command or coercion’ (2011: 456; see also Ugelvik and Dullum, 2012). This article aims to reconsider such conceptualizations of coercion so that it remains within the confines of ‘soft power’. I argue that coercive violence is present in Swedish immigration detention because, unlike prisons, the end purpose of confinement is the physical removal of the unwanted migrant Other. As Walby and Towers point out: ‘The concept of coercive control is now being interpreted in public debate as focused on non-physical, psychological abuse rather than the earlier focus on physical violence’ (2018: 11–12). This article thus aims to empirically identify the mechanisms of coercion that are bound in the ‘soft power’ of kindness. As it goes on to address, the concepts of homeliness and calm are deeply embedded in how staff operationalize in these particular centres – not all as guards or officers per se but as people who are there to support the wellbeing of Others who are ultimately to be removed.

Kanelbullar and krimyoga: The hard and soft contours of immigration detention

As discussed earlier, during this project I gained access to two centres. Centres A and B are situated on the outer peripheries of two Swedish cities, one more isolated than the other, accessible only by semi-regular buses or by car. In any case, they are strongly secured, not by the barbed wire of centres I have visited in the UK ⁵ or Denmark ⁶ but by electronic passes, which keep the centre in lock-down. As a visitor, even a trip from the reception to the bathroom required supervision. Once inside, however, the realities of incarceration are offset by the use of gym facilities, tropical fish, ping-pong tables and – as I will argue later – other mostly non-educational activities to entertain, to provide ‘meaningful’ use of time, and to help pacify detainees as well as pass time.

The significance of prison architecture has a strong literature base, particularly with regard to reformist traditions (see Prison Reform Trust, n.d., for archival materials). Whereas abolitionists argue that prisons and spaces of detention are inherently sites of pain infliction (Davis, 2003; Scott, 2016; Sim, 2009), reformist traditions place emphasis on embedding reasonable living conditions, access to healthcare, and meaningful activities as a means both to preserve humanity and, in more psychosocial ventures, to reform and rehabilitate (see Jewkes et al., 2016; Liebling, 2005).

Both centres embody ‘soft’ elements of prison life rather than openly punitive regimes (Khosravi, 2017). However, like more obviously punitive spaces, there was always the potential for further punishment, such as isolation for up to three days. Detainees receive small amounts of spending money per day (at present, 24 kr, or around €2) to buy confectionary or cigarettes. Smoking is permitted, unlike in Danish centre equivalents, and phones without cameras are allowed to be used. The Internet is available almost 24 hours per day with access to news, Skype and Facebook. ⁷ This partly offsets other forms of relational harm (Canning, 2017: 81–5), which affect people’s ability to contact family or friends. However, S22 pointed out that ‘there are very many who never have any visitors at all’, and S19 stated: ‘They are very much alone and they are living in some … horrid place somewhere in the detention [centre]… They have TV and computer and washing machine and everything, but they are very isolated I think.’ Furthermore, as former detainees in IRCs in the UK have told me, this feeling of isolation can compound other forms of depression or acute sadness (Canning, 2017).

Focusing on this nexus between incarceration as hard and the environment as soft leads to the two empirical reflections from which the title of this article draws its name. The first is from field notes on the architecture and use of entertainment in Centre B:

Although sterile, there is effort to not make this look like a prison. Tropical fish, gyms, an open kitchen (that detainees aren’t permitted to use), access to outdoor space to smoke. Widescreen televisions seem to keep no-one entertained, since no-one is watching them. Although I wonder what would be worse, abject boredom or watching multiple re-runs of ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’. (Field Notes, October 2017)

The second is the use of baking sweet goods as a means to both improve the experience of confinement and – arguably – pacify detainees:

Indeed, many of the officers I formally interviewed or informally spoke with went out of their way to ensure that people felt seen or listened to, even when they were otherwise structurally silenced. Like the kladdkaka introduced above, baking, developing activities, small acts of kindness were aimed to comfort:

We try to bake cookies Saturday, Sunday, every time when we have time we want to do stuff, play football or volleyball or basket. It’s good, it’s good. The food is good and they serve coffee and we sit. It’s hard for the closed building to make it beautiful but we try, maybe we change furniture and flowers [chuckles] and stuff so we can do it like a home atmosphere. (S25)

As Barker points out, the concept of ‘the home’ and homeliness holds particular significance, which can be seen in this quote and in other efforts to make immigration detention more comfortable. Folkhemmet, or the people’s home, is a place for everyone (Stråth, quoted in Barker, 2018: 61), of equality and social security. Despite this, officers recognized that ‘one of the … hardest things you can do against another person, take their freedom’ (S18).

Activities such as table tennis, chess and multiple gym facilities were all aspects of the centres brought to my attention as being ‘good things’ for detainees to access meaningful activities (see also Khosravi’s reflections on the Märsta centre, 2016). The concept of ‘meaningful’ is particularly important with regard to integration in many Nordic states, facilitating a sense of skills acquisition, community or shared values. For people living in detention, however, the concept of ‘meaningful’ is somewhat limited. As Mary Bosworth (2014) argues in the context of British IRCs, educational tools are limited owing to the uncertain temporality of immigration detention, so ongoing educational programmes are limited or non-existent. As one officer told me: ‘some people from the staff might have some aerobics class or boxing class or … we have ping-pong tournaments and football tournaments and stuff, but yeah, nothing educational’ (S24). Instead, activities are geared toward two things, the passing of time and the pacification of detainees. The following dialogue is one example of a pacification technique. The interviewee, a custody officer and activities coordinator at Centre A, referred to an activity she had recently introduced to detainees called ‘krimyoga’. Having been to a workshop with the (White Swedish) instigator of the movement, she endeavoured to implement the activity in the centre:

They wanted to have something to help the prisoners with their anger and everything, anger management … so she has actually worked out the yoga thingy that they do here in Sweden within the prisoners… it worked out very well, the custody centre in the prisons, so I thought well we lock up people too… (S22)

Two points are central here. The first is the emphasis on anger and anger management. Yoga becomes represented here as a tool to reduce negative emotions, to manage anger. This is particularly interesting given that the complexity of emotions can range from uncertainty to depression, or anger at feelings of injustice (Bosworth and Turnbull, 2015). In any case, it individualizes the management of a structural problem: that liberty has been removed and autonomy over one’s own future significantly reduced or eradicated. Second, and perhaps more interesting to criminologists, is the conflation of criminality with people who are not in fact incarcerated for reasons of criminal conviction. Although the intent is clearly well meaning, the politics of such a practice are thus contentious.

Still a rose among thorns?

Immigration detention is indeed arguably architecturally softer in these two centres than in other parts of Europe, far removed from the physical manifestation of degradation in centres such as Moria on Lesvos. Structures are in place to provide comfort. In comparison with the UK, one of the other two countries focused on in this project, Sweden has a disparately low use of detention in relation to the number of asylum applications it received (see Figure 3). However, as Barker points out:

The penal harms associated with mobility controls are extensive and intrusive. They inflict pain on others particularly on those who have been cast outside a shared moral universe… penal harms are oriented around but certainly not limited to the deprivation of security, the deprivation of autonomy, and the deprivation of liberty. (2018: 115)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Asylum applications and number of immigration detainees in Denmark, Sweden and the UK, 2016.

Unlike the UK, where tens of thousands of people are detained each year, with many being eventually released (Women for Refugee Women, 2016), the function of detention is somewhat clearer in Sweden: it is a means to deport. One centre governor told me, ‘they [police] bring people in and we keep them put’. It is little more than a physical function to contain bodies that are thus readily available for deportation with limited opportunity to appeal in practice, if not in theory.

It is in the context of deportation drives that the Swedish state has received significant criticism. Although the detention estate is fairly small, in 2014 Sweden apprehended nearly 73,000 undocumented non-citizens; some 15,000 were ordered to leave the country; just under 7000 were returned (Global Detention Project, 2016). Importantly, this was prior to the so-called closing of the border as the outside world had seen it. Indeed, in her comparative analysis of deportations per 100,000 population from 2014 statistics, Leanne Weber demonstrated that – using a per capita format – Sweden was a world leader in deportation, above the USA, the UK and Australia (Weber, 2015: 162). Thus, as Khosravi (2009) and Barker (2013, 2018) argue, the border was long engrained if somewhat differently enacted.

More recently, the surge in deportations, specifically the use of charter flights to Afghanistan, has drawn powerful protests both inside and outside of the centres (see Khosravi, 2016. for in-depth discussion). Fierce debates on the treatment of unaccompanied minors from Afghanistan have been exacerbated by the suicides of predominantly young men awaiting deportation (Madadi, in Norway Today, 2017). Likewise, anti-deportation campaigns led by people in detention and their external supporters have counteracted centre right and, increasingly, far right discourses from commentators and politicians (Edwards, 2017).

‘Dynamic security’: Coercion in the absence of cooperation

The formal removal of freedom, however, is not the final step in the game of Nordic borders. ⁹ As suggested by S27 (in the Methods section), people are kept in detention to more easily facilitate their removal.

It is here that the nexus between kindness and coercion begins to tighten. Most people staying in immigration detention in Sweden do so for around three weeks. By this stage, short-term relationships might be formed and some aspects of trust built, but boredom has likely set in. From here, the ‘friendships’ between staff and detainees facilitate more open discussions. As one officer told me:

We have something that we call dynamic security, which means that we always try to get a relationship with them, not that we maybe show the pictures of our children, but in a non-personal way we try to… You talk to them, you try to get them to talk about what they want to do with their lives. (S27)

This concept of dynamic security is perhaps the epitome of the difference between the Swedish approach to removal and the approaches in the UK and Denmark. As I have argued elsewhere (Canning, forthcoming), the Danish model is one of banality and semi-carceral realities: the languishing of migrant bodies in deportation centres where access to anything meaningful is deliberately eradicated as part of the Venstre-led government’s strategy for removal and deterrence. In the UK, aspects of intimidation and punitive carceral imprisonment, combined with the threat and reality of unlimited detention, as well as evidence of physical and sexual abuse in IRCs (Bosworth, 2016; Bhatia and Canning, 2016; Canning and Bhatia, 2017), are manifestations of physical control. Sweden, however, exercises ‘soft’ power: the personal manipulation of detainees to encourage voluntary – or perhaps coercively volunteered – removals.

From the empirical data collected, three quotes stand out in reflecting this strategy. First is S18, a long-serving officer at Centre A:

Most of the times I’m starting to talk about the home country, about the families and if they have parents, brothers, sisters, everything, and … they normally then started to think OK, I want to go home. (S18)

If trust is built, emotions become more easily engaged with and the personal history of the detainee becomes exploitable. The role of family members and the missing of home comforts are intertwined with feelings of isolation while being in the centres – again, often far from friends or family.

This strategy becomes slightly more morose with regard to interactions with unaccompanied minors. As mentioned earlier, the Swedish state has received significant internal and external criticism over its treatment of young people, particularly those whose removal is often expedited. As well as multiple suicides, the widespread coverage of uppgivenhetssyndrom, or ‘resignation syndrome’, ¹⁰ in news outlets during 2017 drew negative attention to the mental health impacts of the uncertainty, fear and isolation that young people experience while awaiting asylum in Sweden.

However, as S29 indicates below, emotionally coercive measures to encourage self-elective removal are (for officers at least) preferable to the ‘hard’ alternative – the police:

I have a strategy, most of the guys coming here are quite young. I ask them a little about their family and their mother [chuckles]. When you talk about their mothers they usually want to see them quite soon again, so in most of the cases I manage to not hand over the case to the police. (S29)

The outcome of the culmination of these methods is predictable and palpable: ‘we had some, “Yeah, that is enough, I am tired of this and I want to go home, it’s better back home”’ (S25). People are in effect worn down emotionally as a preferable alternative to holding them down physically.

Keep calm and … get deported anyway

It’s not human if you don’t explain the rules at the beginning of the game, because this is their lives. (S25)

Like the objectives of krimyoga, kindness and coercion also facilitate a form of calm. The Swedish word and concept ‘lugn’ perhaps fits comfortably here: to create a kind of stillness, like an undisturbed pond. ¹¹ As one officer reflected, the main objective of her role was not simply to control but to ‘keep it calm’ (S19). With this in mind, let me reflect on one such strategy.

In late September 2017, I embarked on an oral history with Nour, a woman detained in Centre B. After the interviews finished, having had multiple breaks owing to her distressed state, ¹² Nour asked the accompanying officer why she was being moved to another detention centre, worried that her friends of 13 years in Sweden could not visit her from such a distance. She was informed that they would speak about it later, but not to worry, it would only be for a few days.

On probing the officer, I was told that everyone in Centre B who was not from Afghanistan would be moved to other centres. Simultaneously, citizens of Afghanistan residing at other centres in Sweden would be transported to Centre B so that they could be easily contained and collected in one place for deportation on a charter flight planned to leave the following Monday. The flight would subsequently be stopping in Copenhagen to ‘pick up’ Afghani counterparts in Denmark.

Like a game of chess, once detainees were appropriately moved or contained (depending on national identity) they would be told on the Friday and transported to the airport by Kriminalvårdens (National Transport Unit) – with two staff per detainee – by the Monday. Indeed, once kindness, coercion and efforts to encourage self-removal have failed, the prospect of physical removal increases.

One particularly interesting aspect of this strategy is the effort taken to facilitate calm. Calm is important in the face of detainee anger, and certainly preferable to any physical alternative, as a governor at Centre B indicates here:

One of the best things to do is to keep yourself calm, to not be infected with his or her anger, keep yourself calm and probably just leave him or her be for a while until the one who’s angry has come back to controlling him or herself. (S23)

Likewise, the maintenance of kindness and the relationships already established facilitate a ‘turning back’ to the trusted officer if and when deportation orders arouse feelings of anger:

They get angry. They do. And sometimes … of course they get frustrated. And when we talk to them in the room and they go out and like … bang something, OK … let them do that, let them calm down, let them be! Just be around and then … when they have calmed down then they come to you again because there’s always a lot of questions. (S18)

Finally, if and when that does not work, ‘problem detainees’ would be dealt with in a specific way, as another officer suggests:

It is here that the crux of this argument sits. Calm is no doubt preferable to physical force, and indeed often enacted with the best of intentions by people working under difficult conditions. But it also enables two things: the fracturing of solidarity, and the breaking down of resistance (see also Barker’s discussions on benevolent violence, 2018). Coercion can in part be defined as ‘a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support’ (Crown Prosecution Service, 2017). By moving people who are not from Afghanistan, as discussed in the scenario above, any resistance to deportation is no longer witnessed by those who might otherwise react. It does not matter if the Afghani detainees become angry or reactive – they are being deported, either ‘voluntarily’ or with the help of two guards each. Thus ‘calm’ is inherently maintained for those who are not immediately affected, and, for those who are affected, it no longer matters because there are no other nationalities to witness reactive behaviours and thus puncture any future calm. By now, the potential for solidarity and resistance has been reduced by the fracturing of groups and the moving of disparate nationalities to other centres.

Comfort in confinement? When kindness and kladdkaka don’t cut it

Thus far this article has highlighted the ways in which detention custody officers navigate their roles in a system that aims to hold migrants in confinement based predominantly on notions of national identity and belonging. For some, kindness is key to ensuring comfort – both for the detainees and for themselves. Coercion through dynamic security is a deliberate strategy to enable the breaking down of migrants’ resolve to continue their fight to stay. Notions of home are twofold: one for ensuring comfort while in the centre, despite the structurally violent nature of confinement by diminishing human liberty; the other, a conjuring of memories of a previous home to encourage people to miss loved ones and comforts whose lack was otherwise resigned to the past.

From this stems the penultimate focus of this article: the harms of incarceration in immigration detention centres. As argued throughout, the conditions people face in Centres A and B are less architecturally oppressive than counterparts in other parts of the world, Europe included. However, with the exception of one officer who likened Centre A to a ‘hotel’ for migrants, all participants identified emotional or psychological problems that detainees displayed while living confined in the centre.

A key issue for most detainees that staff identified in both was the prevalence of sleeplessness or sleep distortion (see also Bosworth and Turnbull, 2015). Rather than adhering to the meal times and day-time schedules set by the detention regime, many detainees stayed awake well into the night and slept late into the day. As S19 stated: ‘it’s awake during the night and sleeping in the day. That we are working very hard with … that they should sleep at night. But it’s very hard.’ This, staff argued, placed pressure on officers at night time, but also offset the agendas being developed by activity coordinators to ensure the ‘meaningful’ activities highlighted earlier. S22 in particular felt that:

I’m supposed to offer activities during the day because we want to encourage them to be sleeping at night and up during the day to keep a normal rhythm. Many people tend to swap, to be awake during the night and sleep during the day.

Suggested reasons for this were twofold: maintaining relationships through Skype or Facebook were sometimes affected by different time zones, and stress or depression. As the nurse in Centre B reflected:

They can’t sleep, they are feeling stressed and I don’t know what I should do, they are sleeping all day and then they come to me and say, ‘I can’t sleep during the night.’ ‘Have you slept during the day?’ ‘Yeah, I woke up 4:00 pm.’ ‘Then you can’t go to bed at 11:00.’ But you also have other kinds of problems, high blood pressure, and I should also have high blood pressure, I’m locked in, listen, what should happen with my life. (S26)

Depression was cited as a main contributor to sleeplessness and withdrawal, effectively meaning that, even with the activities offered, not everyone was able to participate. People are not aware of how long they will be detained, nor are they told when their deportation is due until it is imminent, as we see here:

As such, it is unsurprising that uncertainty should take a mental and emotional toll (Bosworth, 2014; Women’s Refugee Commission, 2016). Furthermore, as the nurse from Centre B highlighted, it was not uncommon for detainees to disclose previous experiences of torture, trafficking or abuse. Despite the harms evidenced in incarcerating survivors of such violence (Shaw, 2016), this is still practised (see also International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, 2016, for further details). As discussed earlier in relation to ‘calm’, interviewees often referred to the anger and frustrations that detainees felt, with S27 concluding that:

It’s many different reasons I think. Sometimes they have a history of psychological problems, sometimes they have been using drugs, sometimes people just can’t stand confined places, we even have staff who don’t stay very long sometimes because, even though they have the key, they just can’t stand that they are locked inside all the time and so I think it’s many different variables.

This observation is particularly important in addressing the frustration of confinement itself: although there are many reasons why individuals might be unhappy or depressed, the removal of freedom is inescapable for all migrants held in immigration detention. Furthermore, concerns for the mental health of detainees were specifically raised by one governor, who felt that ‘getting help from psychiatrists and/or psychologists is not that easy for the common man either all the time; we have come a long way but mental health issues are not as easy to get recognized’.

Similar to people incarcerated in prisons, the quality and type of food was identified as a significant site of contention, with S25 highlighting: ‘That’s mostly what we fight about here, with the detainees, food.’ Although trivial on the surface, food is incredibly important: it represents having autonomy over what we put into our bodies and what our bodies become. As Minke and Smoyer (2017) point out in their study in Denmark, there is an added aspect of ethnocentricity in confined spaces that do not cater to diverse demographics. Even with the best intentions to comfort, kladdkaka and kanelbullar are, as S25 pointed out, ‘typically Swedish’. This was a point discussed by participants in both Denmark ¹³ and Sweden, as was the lack of halal food for people practising Islam. However, the deeper aspect to this is the compounding of broader eradications of autonomy, not only through the temporal denial of freedom through incarceration but through the denial of autonomy over one’s own future as the threat of deportation looms:

They often have a negative decision, they cannot stay here, they are going back somewhere that they don’t wanna go back to, and often it’s the small things, like the food. The food is never good. But we have to understand that it’s the frustration and the situation, it’s not personal. (S22)

As such, the frustrations inherent in living in a situation that is unique to immigration detention – uncertainty, spatial isolation and the threat of deportation – manifest further in the denial of autonomy over how, when and what an individual eats.

Conclusion

The use of immigration detention in Sweden is limited, and when it is used the architecture and nature of confinement are, on the face of it at least, fairly soft. As demonstrated throughout, Centres A and B incorporate homely furnishings to create a sense of comfort; activities are meticulously thought up to help time pass; and friendly interactions are encouraged to avoid isolation for the detainees. Some detention custody officers go out of their way to make people feel comfortable, exerting kindness with baked (Swedish) goods, and feeling genuine concern for the wellbeing of people in their ‘care’.

Beyond appearances, however, and as the analyses of these interviews and research interactions indicate, is the constant spectre of coercive control. By embedding calm and kindness in Swedish immigration detention centres, those facing incarceration are encouraged to build trust with the agents working to enact confinement. Human agency and feeling are not diminished here, and certainly the kindness of some detention custody officers should not be undermined, but the goal of detention is still deportation, the preferred strategy of which is a manipulated form of voluntary removal. Through this, calm can be maintained and the unwanted migrant Other removed without the state being reduced to exerting physical force.

As is evident throughout, emotional harms in detention are manifest through temporal uncertainty and the fear of deportation, potentially exacerbating psychological problems for which detainees have limited (if any) support. Moreover, immigration detention, however humanely presented or architecturally ‘soft’, is inherently built on the premise that the removal of one’s freedom – and indeed the removal of Othered bodies – is acceptable if based on restrictive interpretations of citizenship and national identity. Thus, beyond ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ contours of confinement, this in itself forms a significant challenge to notions of rights, and indeed civil liberties.