We Need to Talk About Court Custody

ABSTRACT

Court custody is an overlooked but significant site of incarceration that holds tens of thousands of individuals each year in England and Wales. Providing one of the first scholarly investigations of court custody, we find that insurmountable bureaucratic barriers make it impossible to conduct interview-based empirical research within court custody in England and Wales. We motivate a critical discussion about the gatekeeping role that state processes play in determining criminal justice research topics. We present a thematic analysis of 16 interviews and 26 reports by regulators. We identify three inter-related groups of problematic experiences in court custody—poor cell conditions, the pains of waiting and the pains of judgement—that begin to characterise the dynamics of court custody. We argue that court custody is a distinct form of imprisonment and critical site of criminal justice transitions that significantly impacts other sites of incarceration and has escaped scholarly attention for too long.