Belgium has six administrative detention centres which are managed by the Immigration Office. The purpose of detention is to ensure the effective removal of persons who have been refused entry to or residence in the territory.
Two of these are mapped with this undocumented tag: social_facility:for=illegal_migrants amenity=social_facility social_facility=shelter
This is used nowhere else in the world. Considering that these are “closed reception centers”, i.e. you don’t have the right to leave, this feels closer to amenity=prison to me. And indeed, in the world there is also a single prison:for=migrant. Prison:for is itself undocumented and seldom used. And then there’s prison=migrant, where at least prison itself is a documented key.
For now, I’ve used amenity=prison + prison=rejected_asylum_seekers for the Belgian institutions.
How do you feel about these two options? Are you aware of any other tagging solutions for this kind of facility?
Since this is a facility for various migrants/arriving persons, rejected_asylum_seekers does not seem appropriate to me:
What is a detention center for migrants?
Administrative detention centres for migrants, the so-called ‘closed’ centres, are very similar to prisons. There is one big difference: people in detention centres are not detained because they have committed criminal acts, they are being held for migration-related reasons only. Because they don’t have a residence permit, because they are seeking asylum or because their travel documents or legitimate documents have been found invalid by the border police.
The Caricole transit centre receives all inadmissible individuals, i.e. persons without travel documents or without legitimate documents (false passports, false visas, etc.), persons who do not have a clear purpose for their trip or who do not have sufficient means of subsistence, but also those who are flagged up in the Schengen Information System (SIS).
In France these are called “Centre de rétention administrative”. According to Nominatim results, most are tagged amenity=prison and one is tagged police=detention…
Thanks! Indeed, my proposed value is too specific. I was “migrant” in a few places, but that feels a little too vague to me. I think “illegal_migrants” might be both sufficiently generic and specific.
I would be tempted to say that wiki is wrong then.
If there is some oppressive country that randomly imprisons people (or imprisons whoever is not enthusiastic enough about praising supreme leader or is disliked by secret police or for other bogus reason) then place where these people are kept would be amenity=prison not some other object type.
I suspect that this is meant to distinguish between a jail (or gaol) and a prison rather than distinguish between detention with and without court involvement.
In some countries prison is what you may be sentenced to after a trial while a jail is where people are held on remand before trial if they are thought to be a flight risk or likely to continue the criminal behaviour before the trial can be concluded. IIRC the UK has traditionally had this distinction and still maintains it in talking about whether someone is jailed or imprisoned but due to cost cutting measures often uses prisons to jail people awaiting trial these days. Although take all that with a hefty grain of salt as I’m not a lawyer and am probably getting some of the details wrong.
So from a pure British English point of view on the ‘obvious’ meaning of the tag it would probably make sense to make the distinction, but from a practical standpoint making a jail a subtype of prison probably makes life easier for times where mappers might not be able to read the fine print on the sign next to the gate.
Keeping police=detention separate probably still makes sense though and of course this thread is about whether it makes sense to distinguish immigration facilities at the top level tag.
Edit: to be a bit clearer I think that we should probably move towards police=detention being for the ‘small’ facilities at police stations that people are held at until the police have decided what to charge you with or until they wait for the court to open. The longer term jails fit amenity=prison + prison=pre-trial better to my mind.
Wikipedia has a list of Australian “immigration detention” facilities. Most of the operational ones seem to be mapped as amenity=prison although a couple are either unmapped or just mapped as part of the military base the land is (sometimes) rented from.
It seems like in several countries, including the original Belgian examples, governments often use the same facilities for people with a variety of immigration issues so using a single tag might not be flexible enough unless it’s a catch-all value. Something like prison=immigration_detention might be a suitably generic term to use the same tag for facilities that also houses people awaiting a decision or have been detained for violation of visa conditions etc.
Where the use of a facility is limited to specific categories of immigration law then something like the payment:[method]=yes/no/only, or simple multi-value list tagging could be used without making it more difficult to tag facilities where this information isn’t available.
In general, =prison would be fine. There are already different levels of security, for different inmates, at different stages. Trickier cases exist that’s debatable for =social_facility , eg “halfway houses” for inmates near release, where you have some freedom to go outside, but is not as free and innocent as other =group_home in the other meanings of “halfway house”. prison= doesn’t have to be used. There are already 19 prison:for= , however there’s the limitation from social_facility:for= in mixing different demographs. Jails are larger and more complicated, with different possible combinations.
Someone tried to invent tagging, not document, prison:age= etc that isn’t used yet. Another obvious problem of using male= , female= , etc is confusion with whether other genders are allowed to visit a gendered jail. Key:prison: Revision history - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Another debate for some amenity= vs =prison + prison=Talk:Tag:amenity=prison camp - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Overall speaking, police= has the fundamental issue of whether it’s for police proper only, or all law enforcement. Immigrants and asylum seekers may be held by the borders, or immigration agency. Currently, =detention is voted and defined for those associated with a greater =police / police= facility, not a standalone site on its own.
Why would something that isn’t operational anymore still be tagged as a prison instead of getting a lifecycle prefix?
Hehe, that’s “closed” as in a “closed institution” (i.e. you’re not allowed to go out).
It’s expanding the topic a bit, but it’s a good reminder that this as well should get a specific prison=* value
These are already documented as prison=pre-release
prison:for is discouraged, which I understand. I don’t see why we couldn’t use ; in prison=* where needed
For gender, I’ve used capacity:male etc. Of course then you need to have data about capacity, and not just know the yes/no value. But the prison key page already mentions prison:age as an option, we could use prison:male etc as keys as well
It’s not exactly documented, but imagined by the user creating the page. Not even invented, as there are 0 =pre-release now, and 0 prison:age= as well. What’s being used and not documented is prison=pre_release | Tags | OpenStreetMap Taginfo prison:for= is “discouraged” without any reasoning, and full replacement. While prison:male= etc may work for genders, there is still =diseased , =displaced , =drug_addicted , =lgbtq , =mental_health , =migrant , and =refugee , for what’s documented. social_facility:for= has =terminally_ill , but not general sick inmates. prison:age= would need to be aligned with social_facility:for= viz it’s =senior , not =elder (which also seems to be a English mistake confusing village elders and “elderly”)
The problem isn’t whether semicolon can be used in prison= , but what it should be used for. Different aspects should be separated, not mixed. If the logic of the prison= proposal is followed, should asylum seekers get eg =pre-deportation ? But there may be =pre-appeal when they appeal the decision, etc. So there isn’t only one possible prison= that would apply to them. The detention centers asked in this post need to be explained first.
Furthermore as seen from the prevalence of prison=pre-* , it may better be changed to eg prison:pending= / prison:transitional= (tricky to make prison:stage= work here) =release , =deportation , etc. This simplifies them, and frees up prison= for other uses.
This is a pedantic language definition problem more than it is a mapping problem.
The problem with the word prison and with the word illegal is that it implies intentional wrong doing.
It sounds like this is a detention facility which can be used for any number of groups of people for any number of reasons.
Somebody who walks in a port of entry lawfully and peacefully speaks to an officer but does not qualify for admission may still be sent here.
Often there are one way gates at entry ports and you cannot simply exit the way you came before you are admitted.
Anyone who is not admitted to enter the country may be temporarily detained for administrative purposes.
So do not call this a jail nor a prison. It is (was?) a detention facility. You’ve already caught on to the point that you cannot call it a rejected asylum seeker facility because that is too specific. Jail in prison are likewise too specific. Detention facility
Somebody who walks in a port of entry lawfully and peacefully speaks to an officer but does not qualify for admission may still be sent here.
That’s really not what these facilities are for. As far as I know, it’s really the end of quite a long process that this is where you end up. And you should only be sent there if all your legal recourse to stay in the country are already exhausted. It’s not a coincidence that in other countries (e.g. France & Italy) they also chose amenity=prison for this kind of thing.
Yes, it seems that whole prison=* page was just written down without any discussion. I’ve asked on the wiki and started a Discussion page.
There’s 3 prison=pre_release, so that hardly sounds like an argument
There’s only no prison:age because a mapper decided prison:for is better.
With prison:for sounds like a reasonable way to tag details, it would work for my problem. I don’t see why it should necessarily align with social_facility:for; it’s a different topic.
I don’t think the pre- logic is important as an inspiration; it just happened to be the topic the wiki writer was interested in.
I support @joost_schouppe’s proposal to tag these as prisons.
According to the wiki, police=detention tag is: A dedicated detention facility run by the police in a separate building or wing. People here are typically kept in custody until their trial or for smaller misdemeanors for which they will be released after a short amount of times (e.g. a few days). This is commonly known as jail.
Thus we would not be avoiding the moral connotations by using OSM’s tag for jails. I would also add that the people in these centres have been sentenced they’re not awaiting judgement on their cases, judgement has been rendered, whether that judgement has the legal designation of a felony I feel is irrelevant to that.
And for me to get a little political, I do not feel that us highlighting the nature of these prisons as being prisons is tainting the occupants as criminals, but rather highlighting the occupants’ plight.