In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status subordination in the IRC played out across a range of emotional responses, mediated and framed by gender. While these responses emerged in everyday interactions, the frustrations of life in an IRC, we argue, speak to much wider struggles over the status of immigrants in the UK, the confused and contested purpose of IRCs and the widening of detention as a strategy of migration control; in short, to matters of living under conditions of mass mobility.

This article looks at the trajectory of prison reform in post-Soviet Georgia and Russia. It attempts to understand recent developments through an analysis of the resilient legacies of the culture of punishment born out of the Soviet period. To do this, the article fleshes out the concept of carceral collectivism, which refers to the practices and beliefs that made up prison life in Soviet and now post-Soviet countries. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 revealed a penal culture in notable need of reform. Less obvious, in retrospect, was how over the course of a century this predominantly 'collectivist' culture of punishment was instantiated in routine penal practices that stand in opposition to western penalities. The article shows how the social and physical structuring of collectivism and penal self-governance have remained resilient in the post-Soviet period despite diverging attempts at reform in Russia and Georgia. The article argues that persistent architectural forms and cultural attachment to collectivism constitute this resilience. Finally, the article asks how studies of collectivist punishment in the postSoviet region might inform emerging debates about the reform and restructuring of individualizing, cell-based prisons in western jurisdictions.

This paper finds qualified support for the use of Skarbek's (2011, 2014) governance theory to understand the emergence of prison gang-like groups in Kyrgyzstan, Northern Ireland and Brazil. However, Skarbek's (2011, 2014) governance theory has little to say about how many prison gangs emerge and how they organise comparatively outside the US context. This paper argues that variation in the number of gangs and their monopolization of informal governance can only be explained by considering importation and deprivation theories alongside governance theories. These theories factor in variation in prison environments and pre-existing societal divisions imported into prison, which affect the costs on information transmission and incentives for gang expansion. In particular, the paper pays attention to the wider role social and political processes play in influencing whether monopoly power by prison gangs is supported and legitimized or not.

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