Expensive, unnecessary and cruel

New SDV volunteer, Sheilagh Guthrie, compares visiting Dungavel with her experience in other centres

Having spent several years supporting asylum seekers in the UK, I was quite familiar with the idea of the detention estate. After three visits to Immigration Removal Centres near Heathrow. I was also very aware that immigration detention affects many different people as well as asylum seekers – foreign national offenders, undocumented migrants, visa overstayers and recently arrived visitors to the UK.

My visits to Harmondsworth and Colnbrook were to meet people detained under the Dublin Regulation whereby, pre-Brexit, asylum seekers could be returned to a third country if they had fingerprints taken there.

All three of the people I visited were released and subsequently accepted as refugees, but were profoundly negatively affected by the experience.

I joined SDV because I know how important my visits were to the people I had met in Harmondsworth and Colnbrook, and I wanted to be involved in something local.

Visiting Dungavel is a much more relaxed experience than the two larger Immigration Removal Centres. But it is still surrounded by barbed wire, you need to be searched, you have to hand over all your belongings, and you are double locked into the visiting room!

The main differences are that Dungavel is smaller and is not purpose built, so (despite the barbed wire) it still looks more like the old hunting lodge it once was than a prison. It is also less formal and intimidating – the staff are more friendly with both visitors and people in detention. And it is much more remote than the London centres.

What you notice in all of them is that it’s very quiet. Obviously you aren’t allowed phones, but there is a general air of hush (apart from the cold drinks vending machine at Dungavel which chugs away in the background).

Also common to all is that the people who are detained are confused, frustrated and bewildered as to why they are there and how and when they will leave. And they are all suffering the same injustice – being locked up without trial and for an indefinite period of time.  

Visiting Dungavel as a neutral party provides both support and a positive distraction for the people detained there. But it reinforces my conviction that immigration detention is not only expensive and unnecessary, it’s cruel.

If you’d like to join Sheilagh as a visitor to people in Dungavel, we’re currently recruiting volunteers. Apply here.