Border control within Spanish prisons? Intersections between immigration control and imprisonment in the Southern border of Europe

Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest on analysing the intersections between immigration control and penal institutions, including prisons. Recent scholarship has highlighted that, for many foreign nationals, western European prisons are working as precursors of deportation. However, this research has been mainly focused on northern countries, such as England & Wales, Norway, or the Netherlands, which are far from the southern border of Europe. The purpose of this research is to provide a wider and deeper understanding of how the border materialises inside western European prisons by including Spain, a southern European country, in the picture. In Spain, recent prison orders issued in 2019 have assigned prison Treatment Boards the task of sorting which foreign prisoners are “settled” migrants and will have real chances of reintegration into Spanish society – and, thus, will receive the same treatment as Spanish inmates – and which foreigners are just alien nationals for whom penal expulsion, penitentiary repatriation or administrative post-sentence deportation will be the only options available. Taking this starting point, this paper studies Spanish prison policies and statistics related to the expulsion of imprisoned migrants and analyses the role of the prison in the control of immigration in Spain. Building on this analysis, we discuss to what extent such policies and practices respond to a common trend of western "Europeanization of crimmigration in the prison", as suggested by Pakes and Holt, or, on the contrary, differences between northern and southern European countries need to be acknowledged.