Prisons as places to ‘negotiate’ illegality.

The implementation of migration law is considered as essentially non-punitive, whereby detention is an administrative measure facilitating expulsion (Wilsher 2004, Leerkes & Broeders 2010) and therefore different from the prison sentence under Criminal Law. Scholars point at irregular migrants' counter strategies whereby the obliteration of their name, place and date of birth are crucial forms of resistance in order to avoid expulsion (Ellerman 2010; Broeders & Leerkes 2007).

Recently irregular migrants in the criminal justice system became a prioritized population for expulsion (Fekete & Webber 2010). Due to the criminalization of irregular migration in Belgium with a prison sentence of up to one year, incarcerated irregular migrants (who violated the Criminal Law) are also confronted with identification procedures and the threat of expulsion during imprisonment. Officers of the Belgian Migration Administration try to identify incarcerated irregular migrants to facilitate their expulsion. However, rather than being a confrontation between both parties with irregular migrants' identity at stake, 'illegality' is negotiated. This is a perverse effect of the fact that irregular migrants can benefit from early release procedures in view of expulsion.

Based on interviews with migration officers and incarcerated irregular migrants we will elaborate on this notion of negotiation and show it is a clear marker of the peculiar shift in the relation between migration and crime control and the function of the prison in this process (see i.e. Miller 2005; Stumpf 2006; Bosworth & Guild 2008; Bosworth & Kaufman 2011; Chacón 2009; Dowling & Inda 2013).