Förvarsenheten och dess personal- En studie om de anställdas handlingsutrymme vid en förvarsenhet

Sammanfattning: Not many people know that there exists a custody center for illegal immigrants in Sweden. Here immigrants live unwillingly until they get sent home to their country. They get put in custody because they haven’t got the right to stay in the country and the state is afraid they will go “under ground”. The staff consists of different types of people working every day with these immigrants. There work consists of different rules and guiding they have to follow. The purpose of this essay is to examine the room of action for employees at a custody center, the difficulties they face and how they relate to them. We did this by interviewing staff, all with different backgrounds, at the custody center. We used Lipskys “street-level bureaucracy” as theory. In the material we found that there were mainly two different types of approaches among the staff, a “soft” approach and a “harder” approach. By that we mean the level of intimacy towards the client (the immigrant). We also found that the “softer” group tends to stretch and bend the rules more than the “harder” group who accepts the rules for what they are. The two groups approach the laws differently and they value the importance of rules differently. What the both groups have in common is that they both see their working place as a frustrating place which affects the way of working. The immigrants’ frustration and unhappiness rubs off on the staff.