| সংক্ষিপ্ত: | <p>My DPhil thesis explores responses to deaths in custody. Specifically, it is concerned with how a range of different actors respond to suicidal behaviour – including self-harm, attempted suicide and completed suicide – in prisons and immigration removal centres (IRCs).</p>
<p>It is a theoretical and empirical work, with two overarching aims. The first is to engage with theoretical accounts of imprisonment and immigration detention, as exemplified by literature on the sociology of punishment, and the politics of criminal justice and migration control. Throughout the thesis, I treat prisons and IRCs as social and political institutions, and analyse responses to the problems within them, including suicidal behaviour, as partly political in nature. The theoretical sections of the thesis are found mainly in Chapters 2 and 3, which review a wide range of relevant literature and develop an original argument about responses to deaths in custody. The theoretical claims made in these chapters are substantiated in later empirical sections.</p>
<p>The second aim is to make an original empirical contribution to the study of responses to suicidal behaviour in custody. There are three different types of ‘response’ that I discuss in the thesis, each of which corresponds to an empirical chapter. These are: prevention work inside immigration detention that is carried out by detainee custody officers and managers (Chapter 5); investigations into deaths in prisons and IRCs that are carried out by independent professionals (Chapter 6); policy efforts by political elites and expert bodies to reduce the number and rate of deaths in custody (Chapter 7). In each case, I set out the distinctive dynamics of the field, whether it is the internal life of an immigration detention centre, the bureaucratic process of a death investigation, or the bewildering world of government policymaking. The final chapter connects the theoretical and empirical sections of the thesis.</p>
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