Hallam Tuck

Hallam Tuck is a DPhil Candidate at the Centre for Criminology, where he researches outsourced, all-foreign prisons in the United States of America. Drawing from the fields of Migration studies and Border Criminology, his research asks what the growing integration of punishment and deportation can tell us about the boundaries of membership and the construction of the contemporary nation-state. This project takes a historical and ethnographic approach to the co-evolution of prison privatization and all-foreign prisons, tracing how so-called criminal aliens came to be the default subjects of outsourced incarceration, and how the public-private boundary shapes practices and experiences of custody within these all-foreign prisons. Alongside his primary work on all-foreign prisons, Hallam maintains an interest in US immigration detention, and is currently working on a project related to care, pain, and the regulation of the detention system. His DPhil research is supervised by Professor Mary Bosworth and supported by the University’s Clarendon Fund, and Lincoln College’s Kingsgate Scholarship.

Hallam completed the MSc in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford in 2018, graduating with distinction. His MSc thesis won the annual prize for the best dissertation in Migration Studies, and was the joint-runner up for the Border Criminologies Master’s dissertation prize. He was a founding Editor of Routed Magazine. Before starting graduate school he served as Legal Initiatives Associate at the New York Immigration Coalition, and as a community organizer at a refugee resettlement program in Syracuse, NY. He completed his undergraduate degree in History at the University of Edinburgh.