Mary Bosworth, "Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of British Border Control" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network.

We have the pleasure to welcome Professor Mary Busworth to present her new book, Supply Chain Justice, The Logistics of British Border Control, published in 2025 by Princeton University Press. Mary Busworth is a professor of criminology at Oxford University and co-director of Border Criminologies, a research group focusing on the intersections between criminal justice and border control.

My name is Dr. Hannah Poole, and I'm a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Welcome, Professor Bothworth. Thank you, Hannah. It's very nice to be here.

You just published an amazing book on really the supply chains of border justice. And in your previous books and in your current research, you have delved into detentions and bordering practices in the UK. What first sparked your interest in borders and what made you decide to study them? So I tell this story often to my students, actually, because

Because when I began doing this work, it wasn't that common for criminologists to work on border control. And the origin story, I'm afraid, is September 11th, which is that I was living and working in New York. And the week of September 11th, I was teaching an introduction to criminal justice course.

And we were talking about police profiling. And there'd just been a case in New Jersey about racial police profiling where they were stopping and searching cars driven by young black men for no particular reason. And that week, the students were all outraged by this, outraged by the idea of the intersections of criminal justice and racism. Then September 11th happened. Obviously, the university took a few days off.

And then we returned. When we resumed class, we kind of went back to where we were. And so we finished the week on police profiling.

And what essentially happened after the huge shock of the Twin Towers was that the students' views had changed immensely. And now they were far more robust in their defence of criminal justice and they were much, much more willing to argue for a loosening of any kind of restrictions and due process if it concerned foreign nationals.

And so I sort of paid attention to that in the class and thought, OK, that's interesting. That's new. And then living in New York in the aftermath, there was obviously a lot of immediate sort of suspicion and hostility towards immigrants in general. Lots of people, lots of sectors where there are a lot of recent migrants, particularly taxi drivers, started flying American flags to try and indicate that they were, you know, that you could trust them. And...

And so, you know, that was the beginning of me actually starting to pay attention to the relationship between criminal justice and immigration. And there were, of course, a series of articles that came out of that time around terrorism and the treatment of foreign nationals. I then, in 2005, I think it was, moved back to the United Kingdom and started

It was then, you know, I'd already started to hear about things like immigration detention, which I didn't really know about, actually. And I came back to the UK. I moved to Oxford and I was told that there was an immigration detention centre outside Oxford.

And I sort of thought to myself, oh, it's been a while since I've done any kind of research inside a side of custody, because in America it was very hard to get research access. And I extremely naively thought, you know, why don't I go there? That seems interesting. And so it took quite a long time. I mean, I didn't do it straight away in 2005. I had a newborn child and then I had another child. But in about 2008...

I set about in earnest trying to get permission to go into this detention centre. And by then I was working at the Oxford Centre for Criminology and it took a year to get permission and I had to go through contacts in the prison service that I made through other criminologists

And I eventually got a formal introduction to the civil servant, the man in the home office who was in charge of the detention center, sorry, the entire detention system. And he agreed to meet with me.

And he just said yes, you know, and other people had tried. But I think it was this sort of, it was this irony where the link between criminal justice and border control entirely operated in my favor because as a criminologist, I think everybody sort of assumed I was in favor of more criminal justice. And so all he said to me was, just don't go to the press. That was his one condition.

Yeah, it's fascinating to hear. And when was the first moment that you then thought about writing this particular book? So this particular book, this took even longer to get permission to do, actually. This particular book came about because I

I was I kept working on immigration detention. So I did a project that went from about 2009 to about 2012. And then that was working with detained people. And then I kept working in the field, but I started working on staff work.

And again, I then sort of became aware that there were these other sites of custody, that we were all spending our time thinking about long-term detention, but I started visiting short-term detention. So I went to the sites in France, in northern France, that are run by the UK, and I saw how strange they were. And then I was sort of hearing stories about the deportation agents in the media, and

And I, again, just thought, oh, that seems interesting. Why don't I try and study that? And that was even more naive than the first time around because by now I knew the drill and I knew that it's quite difficult to get research access. And so I asked the various people who you have to ask for permission and they kept agreeing verbally but not ever actually letting me in. And so it wasn't until, well,

Well, the mood began to change with one of the Shaw reviews, so in 2018, but really it was the Brookhouse inquiry where the TASCOR agents were mentioned in that, again, as being problematic and as being violent, that finally the official buy-in came. And so it took over two years to get permission. And I had a very similar experience, once again, that having spent so long trying to get this permission, when I finally was introduced to

to the person who had the power to agree to it, they said, sure, go to every single site, no problem, which I wasn't expecting. Wow. I mean, that is a huge accomplishment and I think really becomes visible in the book. So maybe now delve into it.

What is this supply chain? What are its components and how is this process taking place? So the supply chain that I'm talking about is officially called the immigration detainee escorting system. And in the United Kingdom, this is a wholly privatized, a wholly outsourced system. And it's run

by one company at a time. And it includes over 30 sites of short-term immigration detention. It includes custodial vans that drive people around the country. And it includes the deportation and administrative removal flights.

And the system is organized bureaucratically into two halves. One half is called ICE, which stands for in-country escorting, and one half is called OSE, which stands for overseas escorting. And the reason I refer to it as a supply chain is

rather than as, you know, punishment or another kind of conceptual framework that people that I've used in the past and that are perhaps more common use.

is because as I was doing the project, it became very apparent to me that it was run and organized in much the same way that I believe businesses like Amazon are run and organized, so that you could think of the short-term holding facilities as the warehouses, you know,

you know, the vans as, as the Amazon trucks and the kind of people being forced onto a plane and going out a sort of reverse, a reverse arrival, I guess, of products that, that come into the, you know, that are flown in every day from China and other places where they're manufactured. And,

And so it's partly a metaphor that I use to try and capture the mobility of the system and the financialization of the system. And it's partly in response to the terminology that they themselves use, where they refer to, I talk in the book about how very early in the project, a senior member of staff said to me that this is just a logistics business and that that was how he referred to it.

And in that moment, at first, I thought that was what a sociologist would refer to as a technique of denial, that he was trying to kind of cover over what he was doing by telling me it was just logistics. But actually, the longer I spent in the field, and it was a very long project, I

it became clear to me that even if it was a strategy of denial for some people, it was also actually true. And that I sort of document that throughout the book in all sorts of different ways. Exactly. And maybe to really ask how you do that and in what ways. In your book, Bordering Becomes a Job, performed by many people in precarious work conditions in a system entirely aimed at making profits. Yes.

What offers this perspective of bordering as a work that was missing in debates before, in academic debates, for instance? So part of what I'm trying to do in the book and what I think its contribution is, is that I am trying to draw closer attention to bordering as a job. And

as a job, which is therefore both something that we could think about economically, but as a job, which we should also be trying to understand in, in, in its, in its banality and in its everyday detail. And this is a little bit different, I think, to, to where quite a lot of the field has been concentrating, which, um,

First of all, you know, and quite understandably is on people who are detained or deported. So that's one thing, you know, and I'm saying, okay, let's look at the staff. But then the other thing which I think is different is that when people do look at staff is that everybody's been a little bit more interested in their emotions than perhaps I am. And I once was a little bit more interested in their emotions. So it's not that I don't think people's emotions are interesting, but

But I think that I'm not sure where the critique comes with that way of thinking about work. I don't think actually affect takes us anywhere particularly transformative. Whereas thinking about work as labour and in a more of an economic sense, I think potentially opens up new conversations.

It also de-exceptionalizes the border. So I don't, I mean, I've for a very long time not found ideas around spectacle or the exception particularly helpful in understanding bordering practices and institutions for the simple and perhaps not particularly conceptually complicated reason that when you're in them,

They don't feel like that. They feel very banal and very boring and very much like other places. And the people who do the work, you know, some of them are motivated by, you know, very problematic views, but a lot of them are just doing their job. And I think that's something we need to spend a little bit more time on. Can you describe these banal sites? So the sites that mattered most for your book?

So in the book, I try to kind of trace the process, so to trace the supply chain. And that's immediately a very difficult thing to do because it has many points of entry and exit. And so I had to make a choice about how I would actually represent the system. And so I begin by talking about...

the data gathering and the kind of technical parts of the system. And then I run through a sort of imaginary pathway that somebody could take. So starting with the South Coast, with Dover, which is where, of course, we've had a lot of people arriving on small boats in search of asylum.

through the short-term holding facilities there. And then I move on to the other kinds of short-term holding facilities, which are far less politically contested and far less known about, which are the ones that are hidden in any airport or which are also inside buildings with immigration tribunals.

and some other versions. And then I kind of move into the sort of forms of removal and so the way you can leave on a scheduled flight or the way you can leave on a charted flight. So I try and kind of give the reader a sense of the system from beginning to end. And in doing that, I obviously...

spend more time on certain sites and certain practices than others. And partly that reflected the nature of the fieldwork. And partly that was also me acknowledging the nature of the system. So Dover gets a whole chapter because it's actually has become extremely important to the entire system.

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Your book really draws very heavily on the many abbreviations and specialized terms used within the border enforcement process. For instance, an overseas move refers to a deportation. A personal digital assistant is called a PDA. SAM or SAM stands for a single adult man. And the handover of files is labeled a transaction.

How did you navigate this language and what did it teach you about bordering? Yeah, so it's a funny aspect about any kind of institution, but it's much, I think, more exaggerated in criminal justice and justice.

And the business sector is the obsession with acronyms. And it's something which as a writer, I would normally advise against. So I'm constantly commenting on my students' papers saying, don't use, you know, don't make up acronyms. But immigration control is full of acronyms, as is the business sector. And so I deliberately use them and refer to them both because it reflects the qualitative nature of the work and it's how people talk.

but also because it really captures the profound dehumanization that happens because almost all of them are hiding things

the coercive treatment of one person to another person. And so, you know, Sam's really, I thought, was a kind of classic that people would refer to Sam's rather than saying men, you know, that they meant these men who had come over who were seeking asylum. So they didn't talk about refugees. You know, they didn't talk about men. They just talked about Sam's. And it's both sort of ludicrous

And it's very poignant to kind of think about what does it mean that people don't even, they can't even recognize each other in the words that they're using. And then there are other versions which I think are sort of just faux-like.

So, you know, referring to PDAs for personal digital assistant, which really was a kind of handheld device that half the time didn't actually even work, that they didn't really know how to use. You know, if you call it a PDA, it sort of sounds like you're very professional or that you're very technically minded. But, you know, this whole industry is characterized automatically

Also by things not really working very well. And I think that that that is also important to remember and the acronyms play a role in that as well. What have you learned about bureaucracies throughout your research?

So I think bureaucracy is key to understanding how the system works despite failing to meet its own purported goals. And so one of the things I document in the book is how the busiest people in many respects in this whole setup were the people who planned things. And so bureaucracy

You know, you have to remember that I was doing this during the pandemic. So the rates of failure were particularly high. And by failure, I mean cancelled deportations and cancelled movements of people from one side to another side. But even though they were particularly high, they're always high. So we do know that already from the long-term detention literature that only about half the people who are detained are ever actually arrested.

that the other half are released back into the community. Um,

And what I hadn't really grasped, I guess, from my previous work is that even though everybody knows that the system basically fails in its supposed goals, is that people plan for it all the time. And so every single day people go into offices around the country and book tickets, arrange flights, etc.

check people's visa statuses for the workers, you know, make sure everyone's passports are in date. They do a huge amount of bureaucratic administrative labour only to find every single day that this has been entirely wasted. And so the bureaucracy keeps the system going in many respects and becomes often its sort of only purpose, right?

And what's important about this is that it's privatized. So what the bureaucracy does is it facilitates the transfer of money from the state to the private sector. Mary, violence appears very early in your book. You describe how early in your time in the detention center you actually attended a course on the appropriate use of force.

What did it mean to you as a researcher to witness, record and research the physical aspects of violence? What did it teach you? Yeah, so it was so this project was very difficult and it was very difficult because of the violence.

But the violence that, most of the violence that I observed was actually not physical. So that was, so I found it all quite confusing. I went into it thinking that I would witness a lot of physical violence. And so I did this, I did this, well, I was allowed to do the training in what they refer to as use of force, which is the system where they're taught how to restrain people.

I ended up deciding that I couldn't really do the full training. So I observed most of it. I participated somewhat, but I didn't do the whole course. And so I, but I found that process of kind of watching how they're taught how to apply force in itself, extremely violent and not because they hurt me, but because it was just very painful for,

watching people being taught through acronyms, through role-playing, through a kind of set of very stylized movements to switch off

any kind of compunction they might have and be ready to be violent against somebody else. So that was one form of the violence. I did witness, there were moments where I saw people applying the waist restraint belt and the leg restraints and handcuffs. So I did witness actual violence in some of the deportation flights.

But for the most part, I think the violence that occurs in the system is far more mundane than that. So the violence is much more one about oversight, indifference, failure to kind of offer somebody something that they need, failure to engage with them, failure to ask questions

the questions that are obvious that should be asked. So to give an example, when I was in Dover, one of the, one of the officers was telling me how much she, how much she would try and help women when, when women would come over on the boat, single women traveling on their own and how, you know, she'd noticed that quite a few of them might have gynecological needs of one sort or another and,

And I asked her whether she ever asked if any of them had been sexually assaulted, because we know from the literature that if you, especially if you're a single woman who's coming in and seeking asylum, that you may well have experienced sexual assault. And she immediately sort of refuted any possibility that that would ever have happened. And she certainly never asked any of them about it. And it just seemed to me that that was such a deliberate refusal of

To see what she was seeing, to see that when women were coming in with injuries or when women were coming in with sexually transmitted diseases or, you know, when they were coming in asking for some kind of help, not to ask them whether they'd been raped. I just found that to be actually also a form of violence, a violence of indifference, violence.

And a violence generated by the bureaucracy and by the speed of the system and by this idea that you're just sort of pushing them through to another person so you don't take any responsibility for them. And in your book, you're so good at portraying really the people working at the different sides, but then always also placing them within this system in which they are just one part doing everything.

one little piece of labor that nevertheless creates an entire bordering process. Was there someone that you continued thinking about? Is there one of the interviewees throughout the process that you could introduce to us?

Yeah, so it was another difficulty about the project, actually, is that I think there's an assumption in a lot of qualitative research that you...

that you are politically aligned or ethically aligned with the people who you're trying to understand their experiences. And of course, I'm not politically aligned with border guards. But I also think it's really important to understand

be open hearted and to try and understand people from the position that they're actually in. And so that is what I tried very hard to do in the study. And for the most part, most of the people who I spoke to, I mean, there were exceptions, but mostly I think that people in

I could muster some level of sympathy or understanding. And there certainly were, I mean, there was one woman in particular who really...

had had a very difficult life. In fact, many of the women had had quite difficult life. Many of the women described to me experiences of domestic violence. They, you know, almost all of the people I interviewed had left school pretty early, often with very few qualifications. They weren't really looking at a kind of

life of work that was going to be the kind of work I have, which I have some control over and which is going to fulfill me. And so for some of those people, actually, this job can do that because they get a lot of responsibility very early on. It's quite narrow, but

They are there in charge of other people. And some people rise to the occasion and do try and do things. And they try and suggest things to the company and they try and suggest things to the government. I mean, they're not very often listened to. But I think, you know, there certainly are people in the sector who are motivated to

But mainly I was struck in a hyper middle class way of listening to the many different jobs people have done over their lives as they were made redundant over and over again from work.

from badly paid precarious labour. And I was reflecting on how, although, of course, the university sector is also shaped by precarious labour, for sure, for younger members of staff, I sort of snuck in in the final generation of people who, you know, once you got a job, you were kind of OK. And so I think...

Again, I return to this idea that actually the sort of job it is, is really important, not just in terms of affect, but also in terms of just basic economic arrangements. And that this is a deliberately crafted, poorly paid, poorly trained, precarious line of work where we are putting some of the most vulnerable people in the care of other people who are also themselves quite vulnerable.

And many who worked in logistics before, right? And what struck me was when you described the frustration that was expressed to you that actually people are not like parcels and that the logistics of moving them

had a different dimension to him. And what would you say, like what you bring that into your book and what does it tell us about the way that humans are treated, but also how humans see other humans in these moments?

Yeah, I mean, the way it's interesting, this tension between the claims often made by the senior management that this is a logistics business and then the counterclaims made by people a little bit further down the management level where they would say things like people are not packages. And what, you know, what they mainly meant about people are not packages is they weren't really making a statement about the

their shared humanity. I think sometimes they were, but mainly they were saying it's just much more complicated. So if, you know, if this was a box of cereal, it would be really easy for us to move them from one point to another point. But actually, because it's a person, we have to do all this extra labor. And so the sorts of examples that they raised were often, they were often a little self-serving, to be frank. And so they were, you know, they were around issues about how

In this system, when you go to collect somebody who the Home Office has decided they want to detain or deport, you know quite early on as one of these workers that certain places are easier to collect from than other places. And so there's a very detailed list of the kinds of frustrations that these officers feel about different sorts of sites.

So to give you an example, people quite often enter this supply chain from a police station. So they might have been, you know,

court speeding and then the police run their name through the police database and the immigration database and they realize that they don't actually have status. They don't have immigration status. So then they hold them, they arrest them and they hold them in a police cell for immigration purposes and then they have to be taken from that place either into a long-term detention or highly unusually straight to the airport.

And staff don't particularly like collecting from a police station because they say that the police are very unreliable about having done much of a background check on these people. And so what that can mean is, is that they could show up and it could be the person is totally fine and there's no problem, or they might show up and they might find that actually the person has all sorts of health needs.

And the police are very minded to kind of try and push people out quickly because they have only a certain number of cells and they have their own metrics that they need to be able to respond to. So staff were kind of often a little bit nervous about collecting from a police station.

Collecting from prisons offered a totally different kind of set of challenges, which was that the prison service has its own contract with a different private company to move prisoners. And in that contract, they're under a similar kind of regime about timing and they have a similar sort of set of targets. So what that meant is that when a van collecting somebody from immigration purposes came to the prison gate...

the prison would make them wait until they'd got rid of all of the other people who were being moved to court or to a different penal establishment. And so that would then mess with the metrics of the escort agents because they have to collect within a certain amount of time and then deliver them within a certain amount of time.

And so when people said people are not packages, sometimes they meant that's because they might be sick or they might, you know, they might be upset or they might resist. And sometimes they meant it's because I'm dealing with a kind of, with all these other institutions, which are also packages.

sort of operating according to their own logic, which isn't our logic. And I'm not just collecting an inert object. I'm actually collecting a person who has to be extracted from a prison or from a police station or from a hospital.

You now briefly mentioned deportations. What role do deportations play and hold in the entire supply chain? So deportations really justify the entire system, which is interesting because deportations are the, certainly during my project, are the hardest part of the system to

to do. So when I was doing this project, 70% of deportations were cancelled. So that doesn't even mean that

the person resisted on the way to the plane, it means that the Home Office, having decided that they wanted somebody to be deported, they then decide that they can't deport them. And sometimes, often, that's because the person has not actually used up all of their legal claims and so they can put in a judicial review or other claims and block the deportation order.

But sometimes it was incredibly banal. And so sometimes it was around the documents that they had being in the wrong name. I give an example in the book about I went to observe a deportation. And so I left Oxford at sort of five o'clock in the morning and got down to the place near Gatwick where they all begin, only to find that the home office had cancelled it because they hadn't realised it was public holiday in Kabul. And

And when people are returned to Kabul, they're actually handed over to the IOM, interestingly. And the IOM weren't going to be there because it was a public holiday in Kabul. And so there's loads of different factors that can lead to a deportation failing. And yet...

the state persists in arranging them. And one of the, you know, if there weren't deportations, then the rest of the system gets sort of drawn into question. And so obviously during this project, there were points where there were no deportations because of the lockdowns. And so it was very interesting because what we saw during COVID was, I mean,

This didn't go on for very long, obviously, but there were some months where there were literally no deportations at all and also where they had more or less emptied the detention centres. And so there was a moment, I think, where the numbers fell to something like 400 people or 600 people. I mean, it was very, very low indeed.

But because of the nature of the contract that had been signed, they kept all the short-term holding places open because the government was already paying everybody's salary and everybody assumed and they were right that this would pass. And so they had a whole kind of army of workers going in every single day for a month to

or month or two months knowing that nobody was going to be detained because actually there were no deportations happening. And I thought that was also just a very interesting side of the system, which we haven't really thought about because we tend to, scholars tend to represent detention and deportation as

I don't know, is something that always happens and is very forceful and always continues. But actually, a lot of the time, nothing much is happening. And yet it continues. The final sentence of your book is also by Adam, or whom you name Adam. And in this quote, he's saying that, and here I quote you, the security companies all claim to be different. But at the end of the day, they are all the same. Profit matters most.

Can you contextualize that sentence? So one of the things that I one of the things I studied a lot in this project was how the contract works. And it this connects again to this idea of it being a supply chain. So so during during the height of the pandemic, when things changed,

before I got vaccinated, I didn't feel like I could do fieldwork anymore because I, because you know, you're in very close proximity to other people. So instead I did a fairly long period where I was online and I was invited to observe the online meetings that happen every day. And these would still be happening every day. And in those online meetings, representatives from the private company meet with representatives from the home office, from the public sector, and

And they go over either planned jobs, as they refer to them, so movements of people around the system and deportations, or failed ones. And in the meetings about failure, it became very clear to...

to me that this was another part of the bureaucracy that they were expending a lot of effort in because in the failure the meanings about failure what the company is trying to do is minimize a fine that the home office is is is allowed to apply to them under the terms of the contract

So under the terms of the contract, every single thing that happens every day is given a time. And so, you know, they have to pick people up from prison at a certain time. They have to deliver people to court at nine o'clock in the morning. You can't get to the airport for a scheduled flight more than five hours before a departure. And if the company decides

fails any of those times, or if they are unable to do the job, for example, if somebody, when they go to collect somebody from detention, the person is unwell or resists or isn't there because the system has got the wrong guy, then

they would be fined as well. And so a lot of the discussions were kind of slightly ludicrous around the intense banality of how failure occurs, because failure mainly occurred during the pandemic because people had COVID. And that wasn't considered a sufficient excuse by the home office. So the company had to provide

extra staff. If their staff members had COVID, they had to rustle up some other staff members who could do it, otherwise they would be fined. Other sorts of examples were that, you know, people lost their security pass, you know, somebody's coat was taken. There were these sort of very, very boring reasons for why jobs failed. And what all of it showed me was that

Yeah.

And from the perspective of the worker, of the man I call Adam, he was really trying to capture that aspect that for him as an employee of the company, that he had worked for different companies because each time the contract changes,

The senior management team change, but the low-level staff stay the same. So they just go over to the new contract. I always sort of thought when contracts changed hands, everybody lost their job, but that would be very inefficient. So the regular staff stay the same. The senior staff are...

move on. And so he was, he was really trying to sort of tell me that it didn't matter to him who ran the business, because actually, from his perspective, they were all the same. And from his perspective, what he really thought was most important for them was making a profit.

And of course, you know, he's right. Like the different companies, you can look at them and they do say things differently about themselves and they do have slightly different targets. And the company that has this contract at the moment has tried to do various reforms, but that's what...

happens when you privatize a system because private companies actually, that is their job. Their job is actually to make profit for their shareholders, not for their workers, and certainly obviously not for the people who are being detained and deported. Thank you. You finished your book in early 2024.

What has happened since then? Where does the UK stand at the moment on its supply chain justice, but also more broadly on bordering? So I end the book talking about the whole series of initiatives that came in under the previous government, under the Conservative Party, many of which were focused on the South Coast issue.

And many of which were in response to the numbers of people coming over on the small boats in search of asylum. And I talk in particular in that final chapter about the failed Rwanda scheme. And as I was writing this last chapter that we, you know, they called a snap election and then the Labour Party won. And so I kept having to sort of update it in its final proof forms. And

What has been interesting and rather predictable, but not depressing nonetheless, about the change of government is that while on the one hand, the Labour Party did immediately say they weren't going to do the Rwanda plan, so they weren't going to send people who claimed asylum to Rwanda to have their asylum claim decided there. On the other hand, they haven't changed anything.

any of the other rhetoric substantially around border control. And in fact, if anything, they are escalating it. So what we have seen in the last month or two has been a series of announcements by the Prime Minister and also by the Home Secretary about their increase in deportation flights.

And they're being very pleased about the fact that they've managed to deport more people this year than had happened for a number of years. And they're also in the process of reopening two closed immigration removal centres. There are two caveats to those two claims. One is that they are reopening. They're reopening the one outside Oxford where I first began my research in this field and they're opening one down near Portsmouth.

However, those original plans were to open and expand, and they're actually not expanding them. They're pouring money in into the one in Oxford. They've already paid £70 million to a building contractor, and it's going to create a building that will house or detain, I think, 170 men. So it's a very small institution, which is costing them a lot of money.

The other caveat is these claims about the deportation flights are also, when you look at them, they're a little bit hard to pass because one set of the flights that they're doing seem to be

what we would put in quotation marks as voluntary returns because they have filled a few flights to Brazil and they certainly have a lot of people on them. But people have done a freedom of information request about the figures. And on those flights, there have either been none at all or just two or three escort agents. So people weren't being deported. There was nobody there securing them. They had obviously agreed to go.

The other flights, there are deportation agents on them and they are proper deportations, but they are almost all going to the same destination. So they're almost all going to Albania. And so that's as a result of the Albania-UK agreement.

So, you know, this government has got no new ideas. They are continuing the same bordering rhetoric, which often relies on a criminalising narrative about foreign nationals to justify to the public and which is executed by the private sector. But I don't know that there being any more rhetoric

successful, if you want to think of it in those terms, than the Conservatives. And certainly, it's no answer to the issues that bring people to the UK in search of asylum or, you know, wanting to work or any of the other things that those of us who studied migration and border control know about. Thank you so much, Mary. And I

As almost a last question, were there books that really inspired you to write this book? Or are there any other books that you would like to recommend to us that kind of put your book into a conversation?

That's a good question. That's a hard question because it's been a while since I finished the book itself. I mean, the person who has done a lot of really interesting work within criminology on staff is Anna Aliverti, who works with the public sector. And Anna does fantastic work from somewhat of a different perspective to mine around the border force issues.

immigration, sorry, the immigration enforcement people and the police. And so she's done very careful documentation about the relationship between, I mean, they're both public sector agents, but they're there for different, ostensibly different purposes. And I think what her work shows very nicely is that

kind of lens on border control, which is the way in which it still sits very uneasily within the criminal justice apparatus, even as it's becoming more and more common. So she finds, I think Anna's a bit more optimistic than I am. She finds a lot more ambivalence among the staff than I portray. She's also more interested in their feelings than I am. But I think her work captures very nicely the sort of...

perverse relationship that ends up existing between the demands of immigration control and the requirements of a kind of criminal justice system. And I know she's continuing to do that work, but with more of a focus down in Dover. So I'm interested to see where she gets to with that. Sounds fascinating. And then finally, what are you currently thinking about? So I'm

I have a new project which I'm trying to develop and I talk about it at the end of the book where I talk about

I use this term inclusive infrastructure. So one of the things that was very striking during the previous government was how much money was being poured into things that were clearly never going to work and weren't really even designed to work and which were terribly inhumane. So the Bibi Stockholm Barge and the Rwanda scheme being the two most obvious things.

And I say I talk in the book about, you know, how could we imagine changing the conversation so that instead of always aiming for infrastructure that excludes people, how how might we argue for inclusive infrastructure in which there'd be space for migrants and asylum seekers, but also for for, you know, local communities? And so in Oxford, as I've already said, we have a detention centre that is reopening.

And as I've already said, they've spent 70 million pounds already on one contract just for the building. And then there'll be another contract to run it.

And so what I'm doing is I'm trying to design a project and I've done a little bit of pilot work. I'm trying to design a project in which I would get local people from a range of different groups, including people who live very near to this detention site and the nearby town, some activists, but also, you know, not just people who are going to have the same political views as me, people with different political views to

to try and think creatively about what could be done otherwise. Because I think we have a lot of evidence that border control is harmful and sort of diminishes all of us. So maybe what some of us who are working in this field should be doing is coming up with solutions

actual alternatives. So not the sort of electronic monitoring alternative detention model, but like what could we actually do that's wholly different. And this is very exciting for me, this new project. And I think it'll have artistic value

creative methodologies, it's a huge step for me because I've spent my entire research career being in custody of one sort or another. And so the idea of doing something that is not in custody, I'm finding a bit daunting. But this is what I hope I'm going to be working on for the next few years.

Thank you so much. And we are looking forward to learning about that new project. Thank you so much for your time and your answers, but also your decade-long research that led to your newly published book, Supply Chain Justice, The Logistics of British Border Control. And we are really looking forward to what comes out next. Thank you, Mary. Thank you.