This week it was the turn of Morton Hall to be visited by the virtual Unlocking Detention tour.

Morton Hall was built as an RAF base, then served a low security prison.  It was re-opened, with more security, as a detention centre.

People are locked in their cells from 8pm and 8am, and at further times throughout the day.

Detention centres are often remote and hard to visit – Unlocking Detention seeks to bring the realities of detention a little closer to home.

Isolation was a theme of this week’s innovative Q and A, in which Michael (detained in Morton Hall for TWO YEARS) and his partner Holly came up with questions for each other about the experience of detention, and recorded the results.

Listen to this fascinating Q and A, in which Michael describes how important Holly was to him, ‘a rock’ and Holly speaks of the shock of Michael being kept in detention, something they didn’t think could happen to them.

This week also heard about vulnerability in the immigration detention context, and looking behind the labels, in this fantastic article by Ali McGinley of AVID, published by Justice Gap.  The article draws on the Detention Forum’s recent research report, Rethinking ‘Vulnerability’ in Detention: a Crisis of Harm.

Scottish Detainee Visitors highlighted the acute impact that detention has on people by sharing extracts from their visit reports:

And we continued to explore how detention affects us all, all over the UK, even when the nearest detention centre is many miles away.