Layla Skinns’s research while affiliated with The University of Sheffield and other places

In this piece, we introduce a special issue celebrating Professor Joanna Shapland’s 40-year contribution to criminology and criminal justice. It is derived from an international conference hosted by the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Sheffield on ‘Shifting Logics in Criminal Justice’, which took place on 12–14 April 2023. In the introduction, we reflect on Joanna Shapland’s contributions to the fields of victims, restorative justice, desistance and policing, before providing an overview of the seven papers in the special issue that examine these key themes in her research. There are three papers on the theme of desistance, respectively, by Stephen Farrall, Robin Gålnander and Laura Abrams; two on restorative justice by Rebecca Banwell-Moore, and by Joanna Shapland, Jamie Buchan, Steve Kirwood and Estelle Zinsstag; and, two on policing by Pieter Leloup, and by Jacque de Maillard and Megan O’Neill.

In this article, we examine detainee experiences of dignity in police detention through the lens of materiality. To do this, we draw on sociological and anthropological literature on the ‘material turn’ and its application to criminal justice settings, and a mixed-methods study of police custody in England and Wales. First, we conceptualise different dimensions of materiality in police custody. Second, we show how some forms of materiality, in conjunction with staff–detainee relationships, shape detainee dignity rooted in equal worth, privacy and autonomy. Third, we examine how the intertwining of the social and material in police custody opens up new possibilities for theorising police work. The materiality of police work is active, not just symbolic. Alongside social relations, it shapes citizen experiences of the police, including of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms of policing, and by implication, pain and injustice. Materiality therefore provides a further way of theorising the production of social order inside and outside police detention.

The global pattern of implementing proactive policing to address crime and insecurity continues to drive undercover techniques, including the deployment of police informants. Our aim in this article is to reflect upon research on informants policing, setting out a more comprehensive agenda that appreciates the moral significance and power dynamics at play. Our starting point is that this practice embodies immense moral and emotional tension, both for the police officer and the informant. However, these deeper aspects have been largely underestimated by scholars. Research can garner new insights by conceptualizing the tactic in terms of vulnerability, morality and emotional labour.

As a unique criminal justice organisation, the police present challenges, but also opportunities for those who research them. These are examined, in terms of getting in, getting on, getting your hands dirty and getting through it, using data collected as part of a comparative multi-method study of police custody in large cities in Australia, England, Ireland and the United States in 2007 and 2009. As this research took place on the cusp of the proliferation of research with the police, retrospective examination of field notes is used to reflect on how the research process is influenced not just by one’s social origins but also by the culture of academia and the politics of knowledge production. It is argued that while research with the police is becoming the norm, research on the police is still of value as part of a diverse police research agenda.

As a unique criminal justice organization, the police present challenges, but also opportunities for those who research them. These are examined, in terms of getting in, getting on, getting your hands dirty and getting through it, using data collected as part of a comparative multi-method study of police custody in large cities in Australia, England, Ireland and the US in 2007 and 2009. As this research took place on the cusp of the proliferation of research with the police, retrospective examination of field notes is used to reflect on how the research process is influenced not just by one’s social origins but also by the culture of academia and the politics of knowledge production. It is argued that whilst research with the police is becoming the norm, research on the police is still of value as part of a diverse police research agenda.

Appreciative Inquiry is a methodology originating from organisational psychology, though it has since been used in criminal justice research including police studies. It is used to identify the actual and potential strengths of an individual or an institution, with a view to building on these strengths in the future. The primary purpose of this paper is to assess the value of Appreciative Inquiry for police research, where its use is potentially confounded by aspects of police culture. Drawing on an ESRC-funded study, the ‘good’ police custody study, we critically examine the role of Appreciative Inquiry in enabling access and data collection through appreciatively-informed interviews, examining this from the perspective of the police, the policed and police researchers. We also illustrate how Appreciative Inquiry contributed to the theorisation process and to the development of theoretically-informed recommendations and organisational reforms, matters that are neglected in other police and criminal justice research. We conclude that certain aspects of police culture hinder its use, for example, the cynicism of frontline police officers, whilst the storytelling features of police culture and growing collaboration between police and researchers help overcome these barriers. Appreciative Inquiry must still be used reflexively in police research, recognising for example the tendency towards naïve optimism and its impacts on vulnerable participants. Nonetheless, in light of Appreciative Inquiry dovetailing with growing expectations that the police and academics should work more closely together, there are grounds for appreciating Appreciative Inquiry as an important part of a diverse police research agenda in the future.

Here, we examine the factors influencing whether those detained by the police feel treated with dignity. We develop a human rights-oriented conception of dignity rooted in the equal worth of human beings, encapsulated in detainees’ desire to be “treated like a human being”. The predictors of this are examined using multilevel modelling of survey data collected from 371 detainees in 27 custody facilities in 13 police forces in England and Wales in an ESRC-funded study of ‘good’ police custody. We found that perceptions of the material conditions predicted feelings of dignity, as did detainees’ reactions to being detained, their perceptions of the culture of police custody and the mechanisms used to hold the police to account. Feelings of dignity were also less likely for younger adults and for BAME detainees, with these experiences being mediated by less trust in accountability mechanisms. This paper concludes by examining the implications for ‘good’ police custody.

Background Police–academic partnerships have developed significantly over the past decade or so, spurred on by the expansion of the evidence-based policing movement, the increasing value attached to impactful research in the academy, the ascendance of the professionalisation agenda in the police, and the growing necessity of cross-sectoral collaborations under conditions of post-financial crisis austerity. This trend has given rise to a burgeoning literature in the discipline of criminology which is concerned with charting the progress of these partnerships and setting out the ideal conditions for their future expansion. Aims and objectives we advance a sympathetic critique of this literature, adding a note of caution to its largely optimistic outlook. Methods we do this by combining a narrative review of the literature on police–academic partnerships with insights from elsewhere in the social sciences and observations from our experience of running the International Strand of the N8 Policing Research Partnership. Findings and discussion while we recognise that police–academic partnerships have certainly come a long way, and have the capacity to make important contributions to police work, we argue that they remain ‘fragile’ alliances, beset with fractious occupational cultures, unreliable funding streams and unsustainable inter-institutional relationships. We also reason that the structures underpinning this ‘fragility’ do not represent problems to be overcome, for they help to protect the integrity of the two professions. Conclusion we conclude by offering pragmatic measures for sustaining police–academic partnerships during those difficult periods characterised by cultural dissonance, a paucity of funding and the turnover of key personnel.

In this paper, we analyse pain in police detention and the extent to which Sykes’ pains of imprisonment framework usefully informs this. This analysis is based on extensive in-depth qualitative research in four custody facilities in four English police forces. In parallel to Sykes, we found that detainees felt cut-off, as if they had nothing and had lost control, which were respectively akin to the deprivation of liberty, the deprivation of goods and services, and the deprivation of autonomy. However, moving beyond Sykes, police custody was also uncertain, anticipatory and liminal, and entailed insecurities derived from the material conditions and soundscape. All of these pains of police detention were furthermore enabled or minimised by how staff employed their authority. The synergy between the pains of police detention and the pains of imprisonment arise, in part because police custody has much in common with imprisonment. As such, police custody can be seen as an initial and thus critical point in the ‘penal chain’ or perhaps even the ‘penal painscape’, in which institutions within it have punitive tendencies in common, linked to the delivery of pain. This has implications for the police’s role in society and the role that the pain-punishment nexus plays in this. Pain in police work has traditionally been understood as largely physical in form and rooted in the use of force. As the pains of police detention show, these pains can be more situated, subtle, routine and far-reaching in their effects, potentially extending to other areas of police work.