This book exposes the complex relationship between marketization practices and the expansion of social control tactics related to asylum and immigration. This work represents the first extensive and comparative examination of asylum seekers’ accounts of life within the UK government’s COMPASS housing programme, a series of contracts established in 2012 between the Home Office and major private security firms, such as G4S and Serco, to house destitute asylum seekers. Through an examination of the expanded marketisation of asylum housing, this book explores the lived realities of ‘hostile environments’ and the ways in which exclusionary rhetoric and tactics exist alongside the valorisation of controlled bodies. It draws on interview data from asylum seekers living within the UK’s asylum housing programme reveal the extent to which dispersed accommodation provided through firms like G4S and Serco represents a relatively new and expanding site of hostility in which value is derived from residents’ continued destitution and institutionally enforced exclusion. It explores the experiential effects of outsourcing the accommodation and care of asylum seekers to security firms that have been scrutinised for their questionable human rights records, instances of major fraud and their inability to meet contractual obligations in other areas, including security provision at the 2012 Olympics. It synthesizes public policy, experiential accounts and political, criminological and sociological theory. weiterlesen