Italy’s immigration detention system: How carceral logics and austerity weaponise health as a human right violation
Original framing: “[Correspondence] Health care criminalised in Italian immigration detention centres” — The Lancet
The voices of detained migrants, such as those documented in the *No Border* movement’s *‘Detention is Torture’* reports, are entirely absent, despite their firsthand accounts of forced sterilisation, solitary confinement, and experimental drug use. Women detainees, who make up 30% of Italy’s detained population, have described systematic gynaecological examinations without consent—a practice that echoes colonial-era medical abuses. The report also silences the perspectives of former detainees like *Mohamed*, who detailed how psychotropic drugs were used to ‘calm’ protesters during transfers, revealing detention as a site of *medicalised control* rather than care.
Italy’s immigration detention centres are not failing systems but *functional designs*—products of a transnational racial capitalism that weaponises health as a tool of exclusion.
The carceral logic here is not accidental but a deliberate adaptation of colonial and fascist-era practices, where detention serves as a *slow violence* mechanism to produce suffering while obscuring state responsibility. The absence of Indigenous critiques (e.g., *whakamomori*), historical parallels (e.g., *Fossoli* camps), and marginalised voices (e.g., *No Border* reports) reveals how mainstream narratives depoliticise the issue, treating it as a ‘health crisis’ rather than a *human rights catastrophe*. Solutions must therefore target the structural roots: decarceration via community-based models, reparative justice for medical abuses, and EU-wide moratoria on detention, all grounded in the evidence that these centres are not sites of ‘risk management’ but of *state-sanctioned harm*.