Migration as both trigger and response vector: Penal governance and internal mobility in Turkey

Abstract

This article investigates the entanglement of internal migration, penal governance, and urban inequality through the lived experiences of individuals under probationary regimes in Antalya, Turkey. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with 42 participants sentenced to “unpaid work for the benefit of the public” between 2018 and 2022, it analyzes how penal interventions intersect with mobility, labor precarity, and urban marginality. Building on Wacquant's work on advanced marginality and drawing insights from actor-network theory, the study develops a typology of four migration-criminalization trajectories that unsettle border-focused understandings of the migration-control nexus. Migration emerges simultaneously as cause and consequence of penal processes, shaped by exclusion from formal labor, flight from domestic violence, post-detention relocations, and penal-system-induced displacement. Antalya functions as a space of both anonymity and constraint, where probationary conditions compound informal housing and precarious employment. By foregrounding internal mobility within the logics of punishment, the article conceptualizes “constrained mobility” as a penalized form of movement marked by forced stillness, spatial exclusion, and strategic relocation. It contributes to decentering global North-centric debates by showing how punishment, mobility, and marginality are co-produced in semi-peripheral contexts, revealing the spatialized dimensions of criminalization within national borders.