Hugh Muir asks if we should be proud of a system that indefinitely detains 3,000 men, women and children at any one time (The indefinite detention of refugees is dehumanising, 20 July). No, we should not. Each year, Medical Justice sends volunteer doctors into immigration detention to visit hundreds of detainees and document their scars of torture. Some were persecuted in their country and fled here for safety. Many describe the shock of finding themselves then detained indefinitely without charge in the UK.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists has said that the prevalence of mental illness is high among immigration detainees and that detention centres are likely to precipitate a significant deterioration of mental health in the majority of cases, greatly increasing both the suffering of the individual and the risk of suicide and self-harm. Some detainees end up being transferred to secure psychiatric hospital units, and then taken back to an immigration removal centre later. Some end up losing mental capacity, rendering them unable even to instruct legal representatives. Our volunteer doctors have found widespread inadequate healthcare and exposed instances of medical mistreatment. The high court has found cases of “inhuman and degrading treatment” and inquests have found that neglect has contributed to detainee deaths.

Most immigration detainees are eventually released rather than removed from the UK, their time in detention having served little purpose. We should be utterly ashamed of this system.

A 28-day time limit on immigration detention, as suggested by Hugh Muir, would be an important start, but does not go far enough – vulnerable detainees can experience harm from the very outset of being locked up. We must bring an end to this shameful detention system.

Kristine Harris

Medical Justice

• I have a friend, a gentle, kind young man who travelled from his home in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan through 14 countries, facing all kinds of hardships and horrors and finally got himself to his dream destination. He had made many friends on the way, helping everyone who needed anything wherever he could.

Here, he joined a refugee choir, gave his clothes to those who had less and brought fun and laughter to our household, where he came to live. The day after he sang in the Commonwealth Room in parliament he was arrested, fingerprinted and handcuffed – and vanished. It took a group of us, articulate and middle-class, phoning detention centres around the country to find him. Tired, scared and hungry (it was Ramadan and he was fasting), he had been driven for five hours through the night to the Verne, a detention centre perched on a cliff in Dorset.

He is one of the lucky ones. We have managed to ensure he has his clothes, has phone credit and, most importantly, visitors and letters. Most of those incarcerated see no one from outside. Travel from London, where many are picked up, is expensive and difficult. The guards are kind and seem almost as mystified as the men they have to look after as to why they are there. But this is prison, make no mistake, and inmates have no idea what will happen to them or why. Immigration law is complex and full of pitfalls. You must not work, you must not claim benefits, you must not beg. Yet you just want to live. Lives wasted at huge cost to make a political point to the gutter press. How shameful.

Liza Dresner

London

• It is not only the unlimited period of detention in UK removal centres for refugees seeking asylum that is inhumane, it is also the shameful treatment they face after their eventual discharge. Forbidden to earn money, refugees’ sole income is limited to just £5 a day. This is issued in the form of a Home Office Azure Card, which writer Ali Smith has called “a credit card that debits your dignity”. Redeemable only for basics in designated outlets, it cannot be used to pay for essential travel, not even for the required weekly report to an immigration office. A local police station is ineligible for this purpose and a long walk may be the result. Reliance on charity and goodwill become the only means of survival for many refugees.

Most people I encountered on the recent Refugee Tales Walk from Runnymede to Westminster were horrified to learn such truths from the real-life stories read aloud each evening from the book Refugee Tales, published this week by Comma Press. Few of us had appreciated the scandal of the UK’s behaviour toward those forced to seek refuge in the UK. All people are entitled to dignity, to the rule of law and to work. Indefinite detention in the UK must end, and so must the degrading Azure Card.

Sylvia Argyle

Lewes, East Sussex

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