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Preliminary findings on police custody delivery in the twenty-first century: Is it ‘good’ enough?

Skinns, Layla; Wooff, Andrew; Sprawson, Amy

Authors

Layla Skinns

Amy Sprawson



Abstract

Since the 1980s, police custody in England and Wales has seen the civilianisation and privatisation of key roles formerly performed by police officers and changes to how police custody suites are managed and owned. These changes have been encapsulated in a five-pronged typology of custody suites identified by Skinns et al. Drawing on theories about ‘good’ policing as well as quantitative and qualitative data collected as part of an ongoing study of ‘good’ police custody, this paper provides some preliminary answers to two key questions: Can police custody ever be ‘good’ for suspects and, relatedly, are some types of custody suites likely to be better than others, in this regard? What are the implications for ‘good’ policing? We show that of the five types of custody suites identified in Skinns et al., the ‘unhurried hybrid’ may be particularly beneficial to ‘good’ experiences of police custody; for example, the conditions of custody are better and may facilitate a more trusting relationship between suspects and the police. The data also show that the theories about ‘good’ policing are relevant and useful for conceptualising ‘good’ police custody; though of the five dimensions of ‘good’ policing some (e.g. policing as just) are more relevant than others (e.g. policing as crime reduction).

Citation

Skinns, L., Wooff, A., & Sprawson, A. (2015). Preliminary findings on police custody delivery in the twenty-first century: Is it ‘good’ enough?. Policing and Society, 27(4), 358-371. https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2015.1058377

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jun 1, 2015
Online Publication Date Jul 15, 2015
Publication Date Jul 15, 2015
Deposit Date Jul 21, 2016
Publicly Available Date Oct 26, 2017
Journal Policing and Society
Print ISSN 1043-9463
Electronic ISSN 1477-2728
Publisher Routledge
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 27
Issue 4
Pages 358-371
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2015.1058377
Keywords Sociology and political science, law, police custody,
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/311412
Contract Date Oct 26, 2017

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.








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