What's the difference between detain and imprison?

Detain


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To keep back or from; to withhold.
  • (v. t.) To restrain from proceeding; to stay or stop; to delay; as, we were detained by an accident.
  • (v. t.) To hold or keep in custody.
  • (n.) Detention.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They had allegedly agreed that Younous would not be charged with any crime upon his arrival there and that he would not be detained in Morocco for longer than 72 hours.
  • (2) "We do not yet live in a society where the police or any other officers of the law are entitled to detain people without reasonable justification and demand their papers," Gardiner wrote.
  • (3) A number of asylum seekers detained in the family camp on Nauru have begun peaceful protests over conditions at the centre.
  • (4) Gwendolen Morgan, the lawyer at Bindmans dealing with the case, said: "We have grave concerns about the decision to use this draconian power to detain our client for nine hours on Sunday – for what appear to be highly questionable motives, which we will be asking the high court to consider.
  • (5) He was often detained and occasionally beaten when he returned to Minsk for demonstrations, but “if he thought it was professional duty to uncover something, he did that no matter what threats were made,” Kalinkina said.
  • (6) Another source inside the centre, quoted earlier on the Detained Voices blog, said detainees had banged on their doors throughout the lockdown.
  • (7) China's best-known artist Ai Weiwei has been detained at Beijing airport this morning and police have surrounded his studio in the capital.
  • (8) But under his government the security forces killed more than 2,000 people, and an estimated 25,000 people were detained without trial and often tortured.
  • (9) As for his detention following a possible conviction … although Mr Aswat would have access to mental health services regardless of which prison he was be detained in, his extradition to a country where he had no ties and where he would face an uncertain future in an as yet undetermined institution, and possibly be subjected to the highly restrictive regime in ADX Florence, would violate article 3 of the convention."
  • (10) Filmmaker John Greyson and medic Tarek Loubani were arrested during disturbances in Cairo on 16 August, and detained without charge ever since.
  • (11) Seventeen lightly wounded were detained in the EH and 4 underwent life-saving surgery there.
  • (12) No one has been able to contact him or his friend Wen Tao, who was detained on the same day.
  • (13) The Shah's secret police – Savak – became increasingly brutal, ultimately detaining without trial and torturing tens of thousands of Iranian citizens.
  • (14) In October 2014 an Aboriginal woman died while being detained for mandatory alcohol treatment .
  • (15) Social workers were branded as communists and detained till they confessed, often after coercive treatment.
  • (16) A Tamil asylum seeker, speaking on condition on anonymity, fears being re-detained or deported: We are scared to go and meet the government.
  • (17) He was first deemed medically unfit to be detained in October, but has remained in custody.
  • (18) He was returned to Kuala Lumpur where he was detained by Malaysian immigration officials.
  • (19) I will not find out the charge until I go to trial, so I just do not know.” Fowle, a 56-year-old equipment operator for the city of Moraine, Ohio, said he was originally detained at a large tourist hotel in Pyongyang and later moved to what he described as a suite-style room in a guest house, which he did not name.
  • (20) That’s in the normal range, but should it go to 37.5 you may be whisked off to a holding centre as a suspect Ebola case, where – even if your fever is flu or more likely here, malaria – you will be detained with people who really do have this dangerously contagious virus.

Imprison


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To put in prison or jail; To arrest and detain in custody; to confine.
  • (v. t.) To limit, restrain, or confine in any way.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Under any other circumstances, a penalty of life imprisonment could be imposed on both the woman undergoing the abortion and anyone assisting her – even if the abortion is sought because of a fatal foetal impairment, for example, or because the pregnancy is the result of rape.
  • (2) This time, as a journalist covering the event, I was arrested on the high seas, briefly imprisoned and interrogated on Mururoa itself while the tests continued.
  • (3) And so, through Trove’s archived newspapers, I’ve found Harry – the mission boy who saw the Japanese at Caledon Bay imprison women, girls and old men in the trepang smokehouse, before raping the women in the bush.
  • (4) My idea in Orientalism was to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us.
  • (5) Harnessing its greatest asset – its authors – PEN is planning to publish an open letter to each of the five imprisoned writers every day this week, in the run up to the 33rd annual Day of the Imprisoned Writer on 15 November.
  • (6) For a time, his father was imprisoned and the family banished from Prague.
  • (7) The Meikhtila district chairman, Tin Maung Soe, said one Buddhist man was sentenced to five years' imprisonment on Thursday for causing grievous harm in connection with the killing of two Muslim men.
  • (8) Data were obtained from 41 survivors of imprisonment by the Japanese during World War II.
  • (9) The "consultation" and "informed consent" the reports insist must take place before the project goes ahead are a sick joke in a region in which dissent is ruthlessly crushed and people are imprisoned and tortured simply for speaking their own language.
  • (10) If somebody who has participated in fighting in a foreign civil war returns to Australia, they can be arrested, they could be charged with an offence which carries a maximum penalty of imprisonment for 25 years.
  • (11) The policies of zero tolerance equip local and federal law-enforcement with increasingly autocratic powers of coercion and surveillance (the right to invade anybody's privacy, bend the rules of evidence, search barns, stop motorists, inspect bank records, tap phones) and spread the stain of moral pestilence to ever larger numbers of people assumed to be infected with reefer madness – anarchists and cheap Chinese labour at the turn of the 20th century, known homosexuals and suspected communists in the 1920s, hippies and anti-Vietnam war protesters in the 1960s, nowadays young black men sentenced to long-term imprisonment for possession of a few grams of short-term disembodiment.
  • (12) But while the imprisoned activists and their supporters are fervently hoping that the Queen of Pop will use her Russian platform (Olimpiyskiy stadium, which is a pretty big one) to make a strong statement in their support, so far all she's been able to muster in public is a remark that she's "sorry that they've been arrested".
  • (13) He said he did not oppose the criminalisation of homosexuality but said imprisonment and the death penalty are too harsh.
  • (14) These had such a chilling effect on the provision of abortion that the number carried out by medical staff collapsed in the face of warnings about long terms of imprisonment for those deemed to have broken the law .
  • (15) The number of those imprisoned rose dramatically in 2015, nearly doubling after Sisi’s administration assumed power.
  • (16) She told the court she would not be broken by imprisonment, even if she had to spend 15 or 20 years behind bars, and issued a number of defiant statements from detention.
  • (17) The other seven Australians in the group were sentenced to life imprisonment in Indonesia.
  • (18) So while she is not directly responsible for Sieh's imprisonment, there's not a lot of incentive to get him out either.
  • (19) Originally a member of Yasser Arafat's Fatah, in 1982 he was imprisoned.
  • (20) Guardian Australia has been told some of the men imprisoned were taken from the Manus centre’s secret solitary confinement cells, the Chauka isolation unit.