Nicholas Reed Langen

Officially, Brook House is not a prison, and no one is kept there because they have been convicted of a crime and sentenced by a court. Instead, it houses more than five hundred men who have been found – or are suspected – to be in the country illegally, and are due to be deported. In theory, no one is supposed to reside there for any meaningful length of time. Legislation restricts the use of IRCs (Brook House is one of ten across the UK) to holding those whose deportation is ‘imminent’. But people are routinely detained in IRCs for weeks or months.