‘Detention is morally exhausting’: melancholia of detention centres in France

ABSTRACT

How are ethics articulated in the organization of migrants’ detention in France? While state agents enjoy discretionary power, it is the third sector that claims legal knowledge and good practice, exposing an unresisting and reverent attitude towards the ‘rule of law’. This legalistic gaze on the state attests to the impasse in questioning (the moral grounds of) laws and flaunting intense emotions on a daily basis, an expression of their moral dilemma. In doing so, police officers, legal practitioners and other service providers display contrasting ideological disapproval but practical compliance, creating an environment infused with melancholy. Melancholy enables them to be humble operators of state rules and regulations and, at the same time, to suffer endless (moral and emotional) pain. This article analyses inter-organizational and inter-personal affective experiences in order to demonstrate how melancholy reflects the morale that is manifest in the organization of migrants’ detention.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• detention
• deportation
• melancholia
• legalistic gaze
• France

1. Introduction

There has been considerable scholarly debate on matters related to the meaning of the rule of law, legitimation and legalization in the context of immigration enforcement (Coutin 2005; Van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999), particularly with relation to migrants’ extra-legal detention (Wilsher 2012). In France state representatives dismiss critics of unlawful institutional practices, claiming that human rights framework is unmistakably respected in the country, and that the judicial system ensures the legality of policing, detention and deportation procedures (Vrăbiescu 2021a). The French state thus asserts as legitimate the workings of immigration apparatuses including detention and deportation practices. However, while mechanisms of expulsion depend on French foreign (bilateral) relations, detention remains at the discretion of domestic political decision makers.

In France, Miriam Ticktin warned, due to the liberal notion of exceptionalism, the law ‘operates according to the logic of exception, rather than as a regime of normative justice based on general rules and rights’ (Ticktin 2005, 348). Ticktin argues that the law itself became a governance tool, ‘little more than the means of exercising force’ (Ticktin 2005, 349). She calls for moral responsibility, a call I wholly endorse, but I claim such a possibility is jeopardized by the ‘legalistic gaze’ of French republicanism, which produces an atmosphere of melancholia within state repressive organizations, a collective attitude of acknowledging, witnessing and reproducing useless human suffering while lacking political leverage. Rather than analysing the management of emotions (see Hochschild 1979; Graham 2002) in detention centres, I call upon melancholia to indicate a collective affect produced at the interstices of detention facilities and by the interactions of workers with different functions, such as NGO workers and police officers. As I discuss elsewhere the officers’ career choices and work struggles (Vrăbiescu 2020), I focus here mostly on the interaction between these groups.

The republican ideology promotes inequity by pretending that the public sphere is a ‘neutral’ space where citizens are all equal (Duchesne 2005). French republicanism manifests itself as a ‘colour blind’ arena where socioeconomic and cultural pluralism is not an option (Béland 2003; Lefebvre 2003). Thus the republican universalist principles of equality are put in constant conflict with the acceptance of pluralism in social, economic or cultural rights, which is a basis of contemporary liberal values. In France, the legal field is a key site where the contradiction between the republican ideology and liberal values is manifested and contested.

This state ideology relies on what I call the ‘legalistic gaze’ that protects the state and its workings, exonerating its agents from responsibility while attributing wrongs to flaws in the law. The ‘gaze’ blurs rather than illuminates the law’s problematic ethical foundation. Nevertheless, people’s understandings of moral responsibility transcend state laws, building on values, emotions and beliefs associated with broader conceptions of justice: people can feel injustice even if the law is followed. It becomes important for state institutions to control the emotions produced by their workings, both inside their own organization and in organizations authorized to work with the state. Despite the affective turmoil caused by immigration policies and implementation practices, (liberal) authority classifies emotions as irrational, amoral and unworthy, thus shovelling them away from ethical debate.

Nevertheless, a critical legal movement (critique du droit), focused initially on labour law or criminal justice, included engaged professionals (Champy and Israël 2009) and forms of political use of legal means (e.g. cause lawyering), research institutes (e.g. CESDIP), and a vast scholarly work of legal sociology (see Israël 2013). While conducting my fieldwork (2016–2017) I was baffled by the de-politicization of this legal activism, once so dynamic and valuable for the French society (Agrikoliansky 2010). The sensitive field of immigration enforcement, which has decades long history of strategic litigation for the rights of non-citizens, including by supporting the NGO presence in detention centres (Fischer 2017), became just another professionalized or bureaucratized legal field.

In this article, I demonstrate how the French state’s workings in relation to immigration detention are heavily emotional, imbued with antagonizing affects. It is a policy arena with people struggling to cope and to work through feelings of uncertainty, confusion and mistrust. The underlying inhumane values, the legal protection of repressive and violent structures and practices, and the manipulation of emotions confirm the moral depravity of the state itself. The transformation of moral responsibility into court disputes over ‘rights’ when the primary right to have rights is denied to non-citizens exposes wicked ethics. Instead of problematizing the republican moral grounds that exclude non-citizens from being entitled to receive justice, this shift to the court demonstrates a moral apathy while endorsing the power of the state and law enforcement. Laws and regulations are neither neutral, nor emotionless, and the denial or failure to uphold commonly agreed values means that people working with and for state organizations suffer daily from the inability to address lax and meaningless violence and recurrently induced harm.

Building on the work of scholars who point to the harm produced by forcing the mobility of people (Colombeau 2020; Golash-Boza 2015; Walters and Cornelisse 2010), and to the underlying racism of the borders and deportation (Kalir 2019), this article argues for the human cost of malign ethics supporting French immigration laws and institutions shaped to detain and deport people. It starts by analysing how people working in detention centres absorb various emotions, and claims that their work’s conditions, relations, and moral grounding infuses them with melancholia. This rather undiagnosed collective emotion is the ethical expression of participation in a system of oppression, where pain is witnessed, inflicted and suffered at the same time.

The legalistic gaze reveals the aura around the ‘rule of law’ (l’état de droit) that makes it almost sacrilegious to criticize it and certainly an ideological failure. The legalistic gaze permeates the entire immigration apparatus in France, its laws, policies and institutional practices. When it comes to the overtly repressive elements of the immigration system (such as policing, detention, and deportation) the legalistic gaze was followed by all participants regardless of their critical positioning or ideological distance from the state’s policies and practices. The legalistic gaze exposes and reinforces a certain resignation and a reluctance to contest the laws, practices, and rights of the institutions designed to detain and deport migrants. During my fieldwork I noticed how this rather ‘irrational’ positioning determined an overall atmosphere of melancholia. Administrative detention took a heavy emotional toll on people, most obviously on migrants themselves, but also on police officers, medical personnel, NGO workers and activists – my target groups. However, many of these non-detainees managed this toll through personal compliance with rules. Their suffered or inflicted pain became at times a ‘passionate’ or ‘fabulous’ experience when justice was done. Of course, justice has different meanings for those who seek the release of a detainee versus his/her deportation, as well as for the emotional landscapes they inhabit. This article explores the collective affect or atmosphere of melancholia engulfing the detention of French migrants and how it allows people to participate in its creation and durability, while simultaneously contesting and tolerating the pain and suffering produced.

In the following three sections, I will first expose the simple equation of law with justice, drawing on arguments that challenge the liberal understanding of the law, as well as contextualizing the French debate on legalizing detentions centres. I will then show how different groups of practitioners cope with and participate in the detention organization, how they make sense of their role, work, and internal regulations in detention centres, and how they articulate their ethical challenges. I will then engage with debates on harmful procedures, examining how so-called ‘neutral’ practices lead to emotional and moral pain and how people rationalize the production of violence and their participation in it. I will conclude my analysis on melancholia as central to the (working)life of detention organization by bringing together the legalistic gaze on the state and violence, harm and raw emotions emerging from/within work relations in detention centres.

The law regulating the status of foreigners in France (CESEDA) became significantly harsher with stricter rules for those who had legalized their status, recently been irregularized, or EU citizens abusively detained and deported (Vrăbiescu 2021b). For example, in 2019 the duration of administrative detention in France doubled to 90 days. This can be repeated indefinitely after seven days of release if the undocumented person does not leave France.

All administrative detention centres (CRAs)¹ are managed by the border police (PAF), apart from two centres in Paris managed directly by the Prefecture de Police.² PAF is responsible for the detention and deportation of undocumented foreigners apprehended in France. In contrast with the rest of the country (also French overseas territories) where there is only one NGO offering legal services to deportable people, in Paris there are five NGOs working with illegalized people in state custody: not only in CRAs, but also those detained before arriving on French territory (ZAPI) or held at police stations (LRA). Until the 2000s there was only one NGO with authorization to provide legal services to detainees. This monopoly was broken, only to raise questions regarding the politicization of the NGOs that obtained this legal right. Inside the CRAs, besides the police there are NGOs providing legal advice, an organization providing catering services, and the medical unit (doctors, nurses). Outside the CRAs, NGOs have offices and connect with other activists (bénévoles), who pay visits to detainees to bring them small items or to collect their stories.

This article draws on fieldwork conducted during 2016–2017 alongside the deportation apparatus between France and Romania. It draws on data gathered from interviews and participant observation with actors working inside the CRAs. Although I was not able to visit NGOs’ offices inside the CRAs I had lengthy conversations and recorded interviews with almost all those who operated as frontline workers, or with their supervisors who work on legal files and court cases. I attended trials at the judicial court deciding on liberty and detention procedures and at the administrative court of Paris. I conducted interviews and had conversations with other service providers inside the CRAs, which helped me complete the picture of professional intervention and emotional life inside CRAs. Furthermore, I paid regular visits to detainees and learned from them about the challenges of being locked in the CRAs. These visits enabled me to witness the non-benevolent approach of the officers in the CRAs and their interactions with the ‘outside’ world (with visitors in my case).

2. The legalistic gaze and melancholia

There are substantial psychoanalytic (Butler 1995; Freud [1917] 2005) and postcolonial (Gilroy 2005) debates on melancholy, but here I reflect on the social construction of emotions (Ahmed 2010) and organizational atmosphere (Anderson 2010; Julmi 2017) to explain the resulting ‘climate’ of melancholia in specific contexts where ethics, affect and organizational structures clash. Ferber (2013) recalls how melancholy was historically considered an individual’s attribute and highlights Benjamin’s shifting of the concept away from psychological pathology and towards its social function and ‘mood’ of philosophical disclosure. It is indeed melancholy’s socially normative aspect, its organizational atmosphere and philosophical potential that I aim to rescue here. Conceptually, melancholy allows me to explain the heated emotions and moral paralysis of individuals working alongside the apparatus for migrants’ detention in French liberal democracy.

Melancholy reveals itself as the emotional expression of the ‘morale’ that allows people to continue their work, despite their contribution to the production of evil. Anderson (2010) explains how states create and control ‘morale’ to govern populations under the extreme conditions of ‘total war’ (2010, 163). Morale describes the affective state of governed people who continue doing what they were doing despite extraordinary conditions (Jones et al. 2006; Wall 2020). This contrasts with civil panic, when people cease social functioning, work or regular activities. Building on this, I argue that the legalistic gaze enables the extra-legal conditions of administrative detention to be overlooked, thereby making it more resistant, legitimate and functional. Acting as a buffer, a distorting lens, the legalistic gaze understands law as justice, as the ultimate good, facilitating participation in a mechanism that harms all involved, be they perpetrators or victims.

My understanding of the legalistic gaze follows the liberal legal tradition in conceiving of the state as complying with laws and its opponents as instrumentalizing legalism to correct law infringement. The legalistic gaze, shared by all my interviewees, tends to disregard civil servants’ discretionary power to shift boundaries of inclusion-exclusion and the state’s political power to decide over the enforcement of migration laws and regulations. Legalism affects the detention and deportation of non-citizens by claiming a narrow and liberal vision of the rule of law (Rose 2004). The argument I advance follows Hay (1981), who claims that ‘legal ideology’ is a major instrument of class domination that operates through combining ‘majesty, justice and mercy’. Law in this sense promotes a certain ethics that has class distinction embedded as a moral categorization. In contrast, ‘gaze’ points to a moral paralysis or a distractive attribute of legalism, obscuring the organizational component and the ways in which power works in enforcing migration control.

In the field of mobility and migration legal philosophers have questioned the meaning of the rule of law, legitimization, and legalization (Ellermann 2014; Mattei and Nader 2008; Tamanaha 2006). Specifically, within the French context the ‘rule of law’ has been criticized as swaying between granting protection to and excluding foreigners who are not considered ‘legal’ (Fischer 2013). These fundamental debates have crystallized around the fight for either dissolution or legalization of CRAs. The debate around the existence of CRAs enables the state to strengthen migration governance, whereas the participation of NGOs as legal advisors in the organization of detention has ensured the CRAs function in a way that is legitimate and democratic, yet inhumane. Among others, Richard and Fischer (2008) have explained that ‘through legalization, detention centres were progressively turned into permanent, specialized and increasingly rationalized institutions’ that permitted the rule of law to ‘not be seen as an actual limit to the repression of illegal immigration but as another way to organize it’ (2008, 582). The state became stronger by legalizing its repressive apparatus against non-citizens at the same time as NGOs consolidated their position inside CRAs. This helped to reproduce the illusion of antagonism between the police and civil society, often ignoring the political stance of professionals (be they legal advisors, police officers) or qualifying it as militantism (e.g. Israel 2013).

The ideological ‘schism’ lines up the state (l’état) and its bureaucracies on one side, and NGOs and critical society in general on the other. Activists help reinforce prejudices towards frontline workers as they often visit detainees to explain the benefits of appealing to courts and of taking advantage of the legal services provided by NGOs. They also sometimes offer small gifts such as food, paper and pen, or credit for mobile phones, gestures interpreted by the police-guardians as ‘being on their (the detainees’) side’. This counterfeit polarization builds on humanitarianism which turns the struggle for rights and justice into benevolent labour, an emotional sphere that lies outside the civility and legality for which the state must take responsibility.

Discretionary power, abuse, and subjectivity while enforcing the law is no longer just a slogan, as scholars and jurists demonstrated especially during the pandemic (Fassin 2020; Lehalle, Fischer, and Adam et al. 2020). The legal control of CRAs and the Judge of Freedom and Detention in France (juge des libertés et de la détention, JLD) made futile arguments to liberate undocumented migrants from detention. But concerns about the illegal, unsafe and unhealthy imprisonment of undocumented people were ignored, and the French authorities chose to keep detention facilities open with people locked inside. This reinforced liberal ‘authority’ (Bosworth 2019) in France is distressingly familiar to those recurrently confronted with state agents’ negative and aggressive attitude towards anyone who criticizes cruel laws, repressive practices, and carceral spaces (Flynn and Flynn 2017). Yet, the rationale supported by many abolitionist activists (working in detention or outside) goes as far as refusing to request more state support for detainees because this perpetuates the ‘illegality’ and ‘immorality’ of the organization. The logic and strategy might make sense but, the ethics of this approach remain doubtful.

My first guide to the intricacies of the French detention and deportation apparatus was Simone, a woman in her late 60s who visits the CRAs out of good will and political conviction, encouraging deportable foreigners to appeal and resist. She often spends time in courts (administrative court, criminal justice court – TA, TGI) watching public trials, a habit learned from her daughter who is a lawyer and defends foreigners. After a long conversation about the justice system in France, Simone uttered her disappointment and anger: ‘everything is so arbitrary, and this arbitrariness should not exist in a state of law’. Nevertheless, she explained to me the core of their benevolent actions: facilitating access to rights, because those who lack rights in France are the migrants, the foreigners:

Just before 2012 things turned very difficult for foreigners – to access rights. We had a meeting (legal advisers, practitioners, activists) and we had no idea what can be done [for foreigners]. Then somebody came up with the idea: why not set up an observatory³ for citizens to know what happens in detention centres?… Look, there is something we can do! We are volunteers who try to find what can be done for foreigners. But we cannot give legal advice to foreigners.

(interview J, Paris 2016)

It was here my research took a different turn, towards questioning the ways legal advisors and practitioners relate to the law and whether they acknowledge its instrumentality in the works of the (potentially abusive) state. But not once did lawyers, judges, police officers, or civil workers question the law regarding non-citizens’ detention. The main puzzle regarding the legalistic gaze is that the law against non-citizens is adopted so unproblematically by all practitioners and participants in migrants’ detention. One way to solve this enigma was to learn how each of these actors approaches the question of the legal system is.

NGO workers inside the CRAs have a rationale that explains why and how they are not against the police. They claim to be strictly legal advisors, neither do-gooders, nor ‘anarchists who want to liberate everyone’ (interview D, 2017):

[Someone] should explain to [police officers] that when I go home maybe I do want to set free all [detainees], but we use legal means … we are legal advisors, hey! They think that the whole team is just people who want that the detention centres will not exist. It is just common, the idea that an NGO will not love the police.

(interview F, 2017)

This ethical approach, which allows frontline workers to detach themselves and their beliefs from their work, becomes problematic in terms of relating directly to the police and indirectly with the entire structure of detention and deportation of the Ministry of Interior: the prefecture (which issues detention and deportation orders), the national and border police (who arrest and detain deportable people), and the Ministry of Interior (which regulates the policies and practices of policing, detaining and expulsion of undocumented people). Legal advisors, who are NGO employees working in detention centres, cannot escape being perceived as humanitarian agents, as I will further explain.

2.1. From humanitarianism to legalism, and back

Humanitarian ideology claims to respond to the moral obligation of helping the impoverished, racialized and ‘at risk’ population, at best preserving a ‘needy subject’ (Timmer 2010; Vrăbiescu 2021b). The moral duty of the do-gooder creates forms of dependency where certain people are regarded as without agency. French scholars have shown how problematic it is to build rights related to migration on humanitarian grounds (refugee status being a case in point). In practice, the benevolent moral underpinning of the legal system allows and legitimizes repressive policies.

Distancing themselves from a perilous humanitarian position, NGO workers and activists often aim to defend the human rights of detained foreigners and ensure these rights are respected in situations of deportation or (re)entry denial. They assert their professionalism in offering support to deportable people inside and outside the CRAs that is strictly legal and judicial in character. I often asked NGO workers to reflect on the meaning of their work, the role they play in the organization of detention, and the conditions complicating or facilitating their labour inside and outside the detention centre. The ‘inside’ world of the detention centre was schematized in dark shades and heavy adjectives such as ‘very, very, very, violent’, a ‘repulsive environment’ or just ‘tiring’. This world was not only made of claustrophobic spaces (doors, corridors, offices) but was filled with negative emotions coming from interactions between frontline workers and (usually) police officers:

It’s within the same organization [of detention] that we are there to help and at the same time we are perceived as against the police, which is not at all the case. The police are in charge of the security of the centre and we provide the legal counselling. Thus, we are not ‘against’. Now it’s a bit better than before when during the training police officers were told ‘Be careful with [NGO Z]. They are horrible’. Like we were sort of ‘exasperating [them]’ which is beyond the pale. We are treated differently. (…) there are idiotic things like for example in the CRA Y when we arrive, we have to ask for the keys at the police office. The keys are just [hanging] at the entrance and all the other frontline workers can go in and take their keys but we have to ask the police officer to stand up and go fetch the keys. Anyway, there are officers who say ‘Go ahead, take your keys’ but the rule is that I have no right to put a foot in the [police] office … . I have been called out because my foot was across the door line.

(interview F, 2017)

However, explicit confrontation rarely occurs. The rules are not the same for all detention centres, and the frontline workers are not all from the same NGO. One frontline worker regularly deployed in two detention centres contrasted their different workings:

It’s not at all the same vibe/environment in each CRA. At CRA X (for men) the relation is direct. The detainees can just knock on the window of their office and ask to talk to them. At CRA Y (for women) if a woman detainee wants to see the frontline workers or the other way around, they have to call the (border) police and ask them to bring the woman to their office. They (NGOs) prefer to go and see all the newcomers even if they know that the police have the obligation to inform the detainees about this right and service they can be offered. However, inside the detention centre the frontline workers have no certitude that the detainees are informed about their presence, their role or capacity, and about the services that they can provide to the detainees. This is the responsibility of the police and there is no protocol to establish these rules.

(fieldnotes, 2017)

Besides these discrepancies in internal regulations, many other personal interventions and structural dissonances complete the picture of a chaotic, confusing, and intentionally disagreeable place where misinformation and suspicion come from all directions. Frictions rise between the state and non-state actors, and between different types of non-state actors who provide services for detainees. These frictions result in a full palette of emotions, from anger to passion, from contempt to excitement and even love: ‘It’s violent … but it’s also passionate’ as an experienced frontline worker put it. In addition, camaraderie and love stood out: the love story of a frontline worker and a police officer attested to the humanity and triumph of life in detention. The sense of righteousness of their profession and the legitimacy of the organizations emotionally drains agents who work daily for and against the detention and deportation of non-citizens.

In contrast, when reflecting on the meaning of their work on the rather feminized side of legal services, NGO workers (mostly trained as social workers) rationalized their work and talked warmly about their happiness and the benefits of ‘this type’ of labour. Their job satisfaction and pleasure are typically shaped in two ways: either the enjoyment of legal disputes and the attainment of justice, or the satisfaction of affective labour … only not exactly in these terms:

… I immensely love the law. And it is exciting to always, always, always look for an error. This is super interesting but even more so when you find the error. The humane (my emphasis) situations that are very important. In fact, we are very connected to people … Today we’ve just received a verdict (judicial decision) for a Mr. from Mali who refused to board a deportation flight. He was at the boarding gate and [then] we appealed to the emergency judge [juge des réfères] and we won. He will be set free. So, look … first, [it is great] to find the legal error and second, when this works [in the justice system] is really fantastic! Well, [I know] there are attorneys specialized in fiscal law or … . (mocking pause) but this does not interest me at all. It is indeed the human side. And then the urgency and the crazy adrenaline!

(interview D, 2017)

This satisfaction in winning battles for social justice was emphasized by frontline team coordinator. Their job was to meet the detainee and assess their situation and what documents were needed to challenge the deportation decision taken by the Prefect (the representative of the government in the territory). Outside the CRAs all the NGO workers would compile their data, overview court decisions, meet with other NGOs and experts in the field (lawyers, judicial experts, etc.), attend conferences to learn from one another, share experiences, publish reports, and communicate results and data gathered inside CRAs and during court hearings. Almost all NGOs who provide services in CRAs and other organizations concerned with the administrative imprisonment of foreigners had initiated EU court actions and calls to the EU Commission and the EU Parliament to condemn abusive state practices. These were negatively responded to by EU institutions, contradicting hopes that EU institutions might guarantee democratic processes or ensure human rights are included in the politics of migration.

2.2. Melancholia: violence, agony and the fatality of inflicting harm

The most important thing, one frontline worker confessed, is ‘that we are working for justice, we expose urgent matters and that we bring some humanity to people who are constantly persecuted’ (interview W, 2016). The law thus keeps a ‘humanitarian’ aspect as it has direct implications for people’s lives, which allegedly other streams of justice do not have. This humanitarian aspect is not only about the errors, real and imagined, that contribute to a judicial battle, but also about people’s fate and wellbeing. Moreover, in many circumstances the ‘help’ given was not restricted to legal matters and frontline workers exposed situations in which the aid needed by detainees was related to their lives, struggles, and personal conditions. The violence of the detention system was encountered by frontline workers with a combination of awareness and agony.

Many of those working as legal advisers are trained as social workers, social scientists, and legal scholars, and they often do not dismiss the value of empathy and emotions: ‘We live the imprisonment of people’ (interview F, 2017). However, this statement assumes a fatality of detention (as do many similar statements). CRAs in France are the site of struggles for all actors involved in their functioning. Claims to legal knowledge and good practice reinforce the rule of law and therefore the practice of detention, despite hopes for its abolition. Yet, the limited set of tools available to oppose detention leads to morally diverse positions, as some bitterly acknowledge they end up contributing to the legitimation and perpetuation of migrants’ detention, a realization that augments frontline workers’ fatigue and harrowing feelings. This moral and professional struggle with immigration law and administrative detention is common for legal advisors, medical practitioners, and other service providers.

For doctors and nurses the main problems detainees develop are mental health related issues. They view detention as a system of torture that abandons people to struggle in agonizing pain due to imprisonment, uncertainty, and the terrifying prospect of deportation. Health services for detainees are only minimally legislated for, and doctors can only attest whether a person can be detained, can fly, and that his/her illness can be treated in the ‘home’ country. Any other health care need should not be attended to in detention, even if doctors and nurses are qualified to do so. Some frontline health workers suggested that most detainees would benefit from psychological care. Others holding abolitionist ideals believe that requesting yet another service for detainees may have short-term benefits, but lead to cementing the institution and its legal grounding: the more services are offered by the state, the stronger the legal basis for justifying detention.

In contrast, police officers enjoy discretionary power while enforcing the law, and act with impunity even as they may be critical of migrants’ detention. Yet, they too are affected by various emotions that they must make sense of or just live and work through. They suffer from a perceived lack of respect, frustration with their limited career prospects, and annoyance with co-workers including frontline legal advisors, who they imagine to be ideological opponents. Police training does not include training in deportation or guarding CRAs and they often ‘hate’ the tasks they carry out and ask whether this work should be part of the police service. Nevertheless, many take their law enforcement tasks literally and dismiss any moral responsibility.

Despite the rumours about the officers who serve in CRAs being the least smart and lowest qualified of newly graduated police cadets, I found their aggression had different roots. In a conversation with a retired officer who was assigned to the post to ‘help the young ones’ he confessed his disappointment with detention centres and their associated practices. The border police (PAF) offered incentives to retired officers to help guard detention centres, many joining to earn extra money and pass on practical knowledge to the next generation. Nevertheless, the task of guiding the young officers and explaining basic rules to them – such as how to act towards a detainee not charged with a criminal offence – was a source of constant frustration. I often witnessed shouting and poor communication between the retired and the new recruits. The latter claimed they had authority, not their retired colleagues. In dismissing what they considered a patronizing attitude on the part of their senior colleagues, some officers displayed callousness, irritation, and senseless hostility towards visitors, other workers, or detainees.

Police officers are charged with taking the identification details of visitors, checking bags, and keeping all electronic devices until the visitor leaves the CRA. They must also watch interactions between detainees and visitors and, when language permits, they listen into private conversations. I found them to abuse their job description in multiple ways: they confiscated food I had brought to a detainee; they constantly intervened during my visits, claiming my ID was confusing; they halted a 15-minute visit too early without any good reason, etc. I heard many similar stories from activists and detainees.

Not all police officers behaved like this. One frontline worker described how an officer approached her to help a detainee whom he claimed was his neighbour and had not done anything wrong. She responded that all detainees are someone’s neighbour and not ‘just a foreigner’ and this is a matter of understanding what the law does to people (Interview W, 2017). People rarely think about those close to them as vicious, dangerous, and alien, but people do fall into such state categorizations by law.

Usually, it is the legalistic gaze that masks what the law does to people. The realization that the law not only allows, but imposes violent acts usually comes as a shock, provoking socio-moral paralysis and stirring melancholia. It creates a state of inability to acknowledge the particular character of the present. Recasting Walter Benjamin’s ‘left melancholy’ in French detention centres, I state the contrast between the legal violence and the longing for moral righteousness creates the atmosphere of melancholia. Benjamin explains how ‘heaviness of heart derives from routine’, the routine of disillusion and dissatisfaction with ideological opposition when ‘there is no longer in general any corresponding political action’ (de Maillard, 2020, 30). The work of emotions in the mechanics of the detention system has led to melancholia, best defined as a lack of potential for political action. Developing the argument brought against ‘do-gooders’ or ‘leftists’, the analysis of detention centres in France shows that the morale (moral responsibility) belongs to society at large, and not only to the few organizations or individuals trapped maintaining immigration detention.

The analysis of various services in CRAs provided me with an insight into the organizational culture of detention and how it goes beyond police ethos, legal disputes or migration policies. A contested space, a despised state organization – by the police as much as by the activists – detention centres are a consequence of efforts to deport unwanted bodies. Migrants’ detention is a state creation that opens the way to abuse and lack of accountability. It is an institution created on the fringes of the law (legal but illegitimate) and allows harm to be inflicted to non-citizens.

My visits to CRAs and reflections on them confirmed an understanding of the functioning of this specific organized space. The atmosphere of melancholia was produced by the co-existence of police officers’ frustration, irritation, and hostility; NGO legal advisors’ exhaustion and pain, and the anger many activists felt. Inevitably, not all people were easily accessible nor willing to reveal their aching affects. Those who were most open to talk were legal advisors who regarded their legal work as worthy. The others embraced a secluded and unreachable place, feeding and favouring a melancholia that infiltrated the detention apparatus.

Melancholia explains how frontline workers in CRAs experience contrasting and different but strong emotions simultaneously: irritation, sorrow, suspicion, care and pain. Their urge for justice means they live passionately, and the accelerating rhythm of work leaves little space for reflection. Melancholia allows those moral emotions that can steer outrage and revolt and, at the same time, annihilates the potential for political contestation. Collective moral feelings are expected to thrive outside detention centres where actors debate and confront each other under the spotlight of the respectful republican French society. Inside, however, the torturing, harm and pain inflicted against vulnerable, immobile, and to-be-deported people passes as a tolerable exception. Detention must be kept as an exception. It must also act as an example, not only to deter other non-citizens from becoming illegal and deportable, but also to show the limits of the law, the arm of the state that goes beyond the rule of law.

3. Conclusion

This article has shown how the organization of detention in France endorses a legalistic gaze to preserve the hostile system beyond the rule of law. It demonstrated a spectrum of emotions deprived of their moral grounding. All workers were defending their ‘rightful’ (read ‘virtuous’) position that allows them to work in detention centres. Nobody wants to be on the evil side, and everybody thinks the ‘law’ ensures everyone’s neutrality and takes away responsibility for harm-doing. On the one hand, when the law is enforced, protected, and respected justice is achieved, evoking positive emotions in frontline workers. On the other hand, police officers want to believe the law provides a reasonable solution, and their ethics become circumscribed by a legalistic gaze that obfuscates the cruelty of the law. They are unable to accept that they contribute to vulnerability to harm, and abusive and humiliating practices that people. This creates an atmosphere of melancholia, in which the moral duty to ‘hold on’ to ideals of human behaviour and rights contrasts with the acknowledgement of the inability to act (politically).

Against the potential of dangerous social unrest, the sovereign authority strategizes to appease any collective emotional disruptions. The far-reaching arm of the state sanctions any collective affects and positions that might contest or destabilize the aggressive and torturous institution of detention and deportation. As a result, the melancholic nausea of the organization of detention slowly, surely, and systematically penetrates the souls of people working inside CRAs. It reflects the ‘moral exhaustion’ of people, regardless of their location on allegedly opposite sides of the law: the do-gooders or do-evils, categories that lose their meaning in an all-encompassing melancholia.

Acknowledgement

My gratitude goes to Anne McNevin and colleagues at The New School for Social Research, as well as to Ida Sabelis and my colleagues at Vrije University Amsterdam, for fantastic comments and insightful feedback on previous versions of the article. Special thanks to Bridget Anderson for her close reading and to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful commentaries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the European Research Council, Starting Grant [336319]; and by the WIRL COFUND Grant [713548].

Notes

1. CRA – centre de rétention administrative = detention centres for foreigners who received a deportation order; ZAPI (Zone d’Attente pour Personnes en Instance); LRA (locaux de rétention administrative) are in fact police jails where undocumented people are kept up to 72 hours.

2. For details about the Border Police (PAF) and other police structures see (de Maillard and Skogen 2020).

3. Observatoire de l’enfermement des étrangers.