The role of emotion, space and place in police custody in England: Towards a geography of police custody

Abstract

Police custody is a complex environment, where police officers, detainees and other staff interact in a number of different emotional, spatial and transformative ways. Utilising ethnographic and interview data collected as part of a five-year study which aims to rigorously examine ‘good’ police custody, this paper analyses the ways that liminality and temporality impact on emotion in police custody. Architecture has previously been noted as an important consideration in relation to social control, with literature linking the built environment with people’s emotional ‘readings’ of space. No work, however, has examined the links between temporality, liminality and emotional performativity in a police custody context. In this environment, power dynamics are linked to past experiences of the police, with emotions being intrinsically embodied, relational, liminal and temporal. Emotion management is therefore an important way of conceptualising the dynamic relationships in custody. The paper concludes by arguing that emotional aftershocks symbolise the liminal experience of detainees’ understanding of the police custody process once released, noting that it is important to understand the microscale, lived experience of police custody in order to develop broader understanding of broader social and policing policy in a police custody context.

The Influence of Offender Race, Risk Level, and Participant Emotion on Juvenile Probation Case Judgments

“…It is possible that probation officers would not be as susceptible to emotion effects, due to their professional training. However, others have shown emotion influences the judgments of a variety of different types of actors in the criminal justice system including police (Brown & Daus, ; Wooff & Skinns, ), jurors, ( Nuñez, Schweitzer, Chai, & Myers, ; Wiener, Georges, & Cangas, ), and judges making decisions about juveniles (Eren & Mocan, ). We suspect that future studies will show that probation officers making judgments like those that our lay sample made are not immune from the negative consequences of intensified emotions like fear, especially when these emotions are evoked by those that the officers serve.…”

Containment and care? A qualitative interview study exploring police custody staff views about delivering brief alcohol interventions to heavy drinking arrestees

“…Whilst it is evident that the custody suite is a complex and busy environment (Wooff & Skinns, 2017), the findings of the linked feasibility trial demonstrate that arrestees rarely attend alcohol interventions that are offered on a subsequent occasion. This suggests that for intervention to occur, it must be provided opportunistically whilst the arrestee is in the custody suite (Addison et al, 2018).…”

“…Custody staff was asked to screen arrestees and deliver the randomised intervention (where applicable) at any stage in the processing of the arrestees they considered feasible, based upon their understanding of the specific context. This allowed custody staff the opportunity to consider the most appropriate time and place to administer the tools, as the geography of police custody has been found to impact upon arrestee emotions (Wooff & Skinns, 2017). Typically, DOs approached arrestees during fingerprinting and discharge or whilst they were being held in the cells.…”

Contemporary criminal defence practice: importance of active involvement at the investigative stage and related training requirements

“…The detention suite of a police station is a place of heightened emotion, partly due to the inherent time pressures (Skinns, 2011;Wooff & Skinns, 2018). Clients may be stressed and urgently seeking release, police officers may be under pressure to carry out interrogations (and get results) within certain time limits, and lawyers, who are likely to have been called away from other duties or responsibilities elsewhere, may be stressed by the need to make important decisions and give essential advice within a relatively short time.…”