Confined in a Detention Center U nder conditions of mass mobility, migration-related detention has become part of a set of border control measures that are implemented in the majority of countries across the world, particularly in the global North (Bosworth 2014; Bosworth and Kellezi 2014). The proliferation of border zones and detention centers-where various categories of people marked as outsiders are confined pending the adjudication of their statusplays a key role in the government of human mobility and in the continuous production of nation-state and citizenship boundaries (Luibhéid 2005). In spite of growing academic interest in the adverse effects of detention and deportation (e.g., Sobhanian et al. 2006; Robjant, Robbins, and Senior 2009), relatively little attention has been paid to the potential relationships between the violence that affects people in their countries of origin and contemporary immigration laws and policies (Lykes and Hershberg 2015). Even less effort has been devoted to understanding how gender and sexualityalong with race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and geopolitics-shape such relationships, playing a role in the production of particular subjects as excludable and deportable (Lewis 2013). As Eithne Luibhéid (2005) clearly notes, multiaxial differentiations that operate through immigration control regimes not only distinguish citizens from noncitizens but also discriminate among noncitizens themselves, stemming from and reinforcing normative power hierarchies. This research was carried out as a part of Francesca Esposito's doctoral thesis, supported by a scholarship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BD/ 87854/2012). We would like to thank Maayan Ravid, Rimple Mehta, Gaia Giuliani, Simone Tulumello, and Erica Briozzo for their encouragement for this project by offering their time and insightful feedback, as well as Signs's editor and anonymous reviewers who provided critical comments on this article. We also need to thank the organizers and participants of the workshop "Critical Prison Studies, Carceral Ethnography, and Human Rights: From Lived Experience to Global Action," held at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, where we presented an earlier version of this article, for their generous input and comments. Last, and most important, we are grateful to the BeFree team and to the women we met inside Rome's detention center for sharing their stories and struggles with us.

Although migration-related detention has proliferated around the world, little is known about life inside these sites of confinement for illegalized non-citizens. Building on 34 months of fieldwork, this article examines the lived experiences of center staff and external civil-society actors engaged within Rome’s detention center. We discuss the emotional, ethical, and political challenges faced by these professional actors in their everyday work and their relationship with detainees. Our aim is to shed light on psychosocial life in detention and the intersections between humanitarian and security logics in this setting. In doing so, we problematize the idea that “humanizing detention” can be a solution for change.