The role of emotion, space and place in police custody in England: Towards a geography of police custody
| Author | Layla Skinns,Andrew Wooff |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474517722176 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
2018, Vol. 20(5) 562–579
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474517722176
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Article
The role of emotion,
space and place in police
custody in England:
Towards a geography
of police custody
Andrew Wooff
Edinburgh Napier University, UK
Layla Skinns
University of Sheffield, UK
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 pre-
viously 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 emo-
tional 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 under-
standing of broader social and policing policy in a police custody context.
Keywords
emotion, emotion management, liminality, police custody, space and place, temporality
Corresponding author:
Andrew Wooff, Edinburgh Napier University, Sighthill Court, Edinburgh EH11 4BN, UK.
Email: a.wooff@napier.ac.uk
Introduction: Geographies of police custody
Police custody is the place that people are taken once they have been arrested and
whilst the police investigate allegations made against them. Carceral geography
refers to ‘research into practices of incarceration, viewing such carceral spaces
broadly as a type of institution whose distributional geographies, and geographies
of internal and external social and spatial relations, should be explored’
(Moran, 2015: 2). As the field of carceral geography has emerged with vibrancy
over the past decade (Moran, 2015; Philo, 2011; Sibley and Hoven, 2009), explor-
ation of the nexus between the holding space of incarceration, the emotional
embodiment of the environment and the micro-scale impact of incarceration on
the individual have become important to understand. In particular, focusing on the
multiple ways that being held in custody can impact emotionally on staff and
detainees and understanding that the carceral space is itself a space which both
influences and impacts on the lived experience of being in police custody.
Police custody is often conceived of as akin to a ‘miniature prison’ (see Skinns,
2011; Skinns et al., 2017b), yet there are some distinct areas of difference between
the two environments. An important difference relates to the temporality of cus-
tody; this is an environment where under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act
1984 (PACE), detainees can be held for up to 24, 36 or 96 hours depending on what
they have been arrested for, but this is not routinely the case.
1
The temporal nature
of police custody impacts all processes in this space; from the police coordination
of the investigation and other criminal justice practitioners, ensuring that detainees
are dealt with expeditiously, to the unending sense of uncertainty about time
experienced by detainees.
Affect has become an important way of considering how the body interacts with
space. As Thrift (2004) identifies, there is no stable definition of affect, however,
for the purposes of this paper, affect is going to focus on the role of emotion in the
way that detainees and staff experience custody. In a geographical sense, the rise of
affect theory has sought to challenge the dualisms around mind/body, space/body,
subject/object, with Thrift (2004) highlighting that the mind and body are co-
constituted through connections and intensities of ‘continual encounters’.
Custody is a particular spatial context, however, where connections are imbued
with power, a lack of explicit choice and a space where detainees’ bodies and
environment are impermanent, but are affected by interactions between and with
others in generating new forms of embodied materiality.
Liminality and transience are key factors in the custody environment.
The notion of liminality has been successfully applied to criminal justice popula-
tions. In anthropology, a liminal zone is an intermediate which was initially linked
to rites of passage. When we travel, liminal zones also occur when we are stateless,
between for example one passport control and another. Turner (1967) developed
the idea of liminality as an ‘interstructural’ state in which the person is ‘betwixt and
between’ socially constructed identities. When someone enters custody they are
accused of committing an offence – for the time they are there, they exist in an
in-between phase of being. They are captive in a space and when they emerge,
Wooff and Skinns 563
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