'lost people'

Adie, a lovely guy I met through climate camp has been deported back to the UK from an Israeli jail. He was on another Free Gaza boat mission and got detained in an immigration prison. One comment he made has stuck in my head. He said, on seeing the terrible way immigrants were kept, sometimes for years on end “It was like dipping your toe in an enormous pool of lost people”.
A link to this: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/07/433971.html

Immigration prisons. Since when did migration become a crime? People, birds, animals, fish migrate and always have done. When you call it a prison, you criminalise everyone trapped inside and that makes it 'ok' to lock em up. Or you call it a Detention centre, that disgusting euphemism, as though the men, women and children in places like Yarlswood are not really being mistreated, humiliated and traumatised, only 'detained'. There are around 2000 children being 'detained' in the UK. And here's an interesting link to a report on the way they live:
http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2008/09/child_prisoners