Post – Deviance Societe

English

Basing itself on archives and press releases, this contribution proposes a socio-historical survey of three critical sequences in the history of immigration detention and its reforms in France. The joint analysis of these three periods – 1975-1984, the early 2000s and the 2007-2010 era – first reveals the institutionalization of immigration detention, which started as an informal police practice and became a strongly codified and fully developed activity. It underlines above all the renewed social pattern that shaped each of these reforms: as early as 1980, each centre indeed included advocates from a national Human Rights organization, whose official mandate was to legally assist confined immigrants, but who also retained the capacity to denounce publicly certain situations they directly witnessed. Each reform of immigration detention is then an occasion to reassess this critical public expression, the conditions of its acceptability, and the forms it may take. But this « institutionalized » critical advocacy also tends to modify the very debates over each detention reform, by opening up the sphere of debate to new actors or topics.