Mental health and death in custody: the Angiolini ReviewBruce-Jones, Eddie
doi: 10.1177/0306396820968033pmid: N/A
The author discusses the findings and recommendations of the first official review of practices and processes relating to and following police-related deaths in the UK. Dame Elish Angiolini’s 2017 report paid particular notice to mental health implications and the impact on families who had lost loved ones. Excerpts are provided here of remarks by Deborah Coles (of INQUEST) and Marcia Rigg (of the United Families and Friends Campaign) at the report’s launch – focusing on the call for automatic legal aid for families at inquests and the end to police conferring after an incident. Though not an abolitionist text, the author points to certain recommendations which could lead to less and less dangerous policing of vulnerable communities.
Racial surveillance and the mental health impacts of electronic monitoring on migrantsBhatia, Monish
doi: 10.1177/0306396820963485pmid: N/A
Since the late 1990s, the government has used outsourced electronic monitoring (also known as tagging) in England and Wales for criminal sentencing and punishment. Under the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004, s36, the use of this technology extended to immigration controls, and individuals deemed as ‘high risk’ of harm, reoffending or absconding can be fitted with an ankle device and subjected to curfew. The tagging of migrants is not authorised by the criminal court and therefore not considered a punitive sanction. It is managed by the immigration system and treated as an administrative matter. Nevertheless, people who are tagged experience it as imprisonment and punishment. Drawing on data from an eighteen-month ethnographic research project, this article examines the impact of electronic monitoring on people seeking asylum, who completed their sentences for immigration offences. It uncovers the psychological effects and mental health impacts of such technologies of control. The article sheds light on how tagging is experienced by racialised minorities, and adds to the literature on migration, surveillance studies, state racism and violence.
Policing in Europe: disability justice and abolitionist intersectional careThompson, Vanessa E.
doi: 10.1177/0306396820966463pmid: N/A
Over the last few years, the intersections between mental health and punitive violence have gained more attention within scholarship and activism around race and policing. Disability justice and intersectional approaches have argued that the discourses around and categorisations of various forms of disability are deeply rooted in projects of colonialism and enslavement, and their legacies. These discourses are strongly enacted in contemporary logics and practices of policing, as racialised people who identify or are categorised as mad, neurodiverse, mentally ill, psychiatric survivors and disabled are particularly vulnerable to police harassment and violence. This article discusses how policing is deeply intertwined with discourses around saneism – institutional and systemic oppression of people who identify, have been diagnosed as, or are perceived to be, mentally ill, which has implications for abolitionist intersectional thought and practice. Foregrounding a black feminist abolitionist analysis, in dialogue with intersectional disability justice and mad studies, the author argues that an accountable engagement with the mad analytics of policing of black lives has important implications for intersectional and abolitionist thought and activism as forms of care/ing for black lives.
Time, torture and Manus Island: an interview with Behrouz Boochani and Omid TofighianBhatia, Monish; Bruce-Jones, Eddie
doi: 10.1177/0306396820965348pmid: N/A
Former asylum seeker detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani (author of No Friend but the Mountains) and his collaborator Omid Tofighian speak about the experience of indefinite incarceration on Australia’s Manus Island and the psychological toll of waiting. They compare this form of detention to prison and the existential impact to torture. This Kyriarchal System, they argue, strips the individual of identity and humanity and they explain how such a system can perhaps be questioned better through the poetic fiction that Boochani has used in his path-breaking narrative than through appeal to dry rational facts and figures.
Baptised by fire: an interview with Suresh Grover: Nijjar, Jasbinder S.
doi: 10.1177/0306396820965347pmid: N/A
In this contribution to narrating the black British history of struggle, one of the leading lights of community-based anti-racism, who has worked over four decades from Southall, west of London and one of the first post-war settlements of ‘New Commonwealth’ Asian workers, is interviewed. He records some of the milestone struggles of The Monitoring Group from the street campaigning against lethal racist violence in the 1970s to the nationally important watershed government-commissioned report by Macpherson acknowledging institutional racism in 1999. Suresh Grover explains the impetus for organising, and the ways of building an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal movement around and beyond family campaigns against state injustices – changing over time to meet new circumstances.