Welcome to my blog

I thought this would be a great way to tell everyone about the many interesting things that I do in my professional life as a researcher, writer and educator. At the moment, my interest is mainly focused on policing and more specifically on police custody i.e. where people are taken on arrest whilst a decision is reached about charge. Watch this space for updates on my whirlwind academic life.

About Me

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Layla Skinns is a Senior Lecturer in criminology in the Centre for Criminological Research at the School of Law, University of Sheffield. Before joining the Centre for Criminological Research, Layla worked at the University of Cambridge, where she was the Adrian Socio-Legal Research Fellow at Darwin College and a Teaching Associate on the MSt. in Applied Criminology for senior police, prison and probation staff. Whilst working as a Research Fellow at Darwin College, she co-organised the prestigious Darwin College Lecture Series on the theme of risk. Her qualifications are: MA (Hons) Sociology and Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 2000; MPhil Criminological Research, University of Cambridge, 2001 and PhD Criminology, University of Cambridge, 2005

Tuesday 5 November 2013

£500 bursary for CCR Visiting Fellows


Dear Readers

In conjunction with colleagues, I have been in the process of re-developing the Visiting Fellow scheme for the Centre for Criminological Research (CCR), School of Law, University of Sheffield. The aim of the scheme is to foster knowledge exchange and research collaborations between CCR members and scholars from other Universities in the UK or abroad. Please see here for further details about the scheme and expectations of visitors.

 
Further to this, we are delighted to announce that from 2013/14 we will be offering an annual bursary of up to £500 for members of staff of any level of seniority who wish to spend time visiting myself or any other colleague in CCR.

 
CCR is one of the oldest criminology centres in the UK, with a world-leading reputation and including staff with a wide range of criminological interests. I have found it to be a wonderful place to work for the four years that I have been there thus far. Any visitor would be welcomed into its vibrant research community and its collegial atmosphere.

 
Please get in touch if you are interested to find out more on L.Skinns@sheffield.ac.uk

 
Layla

Police custody: plus ça change?

In a recent review of my 2011 book on police custody, the eminent policing scholar, Robert Reiner, noted how fascinating it was to learn about how much (or rather how little) had changed since his own study of police custody practices in the early years of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. This is in spite of the “seemingly massive changes in the policing world, not to speak of wider society, in the intervening decades”, he says. In this review, he later notes that “[t]he overall feeling conveyed by [the book] is that for all the superficial changes at the routine operational level, plus ça change is the main theme. For all the ceaseless fashion parade of new discourses and initiatives, the everyday practice of policing is structured by macro political-economic and cultural processes that have changed in ways that intensify the patterns observed by the classic police ethnographies of the 1960s and 1970s.”

His insightful comments about the overall direction of the book through the notion of plus ça change (i.e. the idea that everything changes, yet it all stays the same), was the focus of a talk that I gave on Friday 1 November 2014 as part of the Innocence Network UK annual conference. What I argued was that aspects of policing (of relevance to police custody) have fundamentally altered for the better through the improved regulation of police custody, particularly through the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the associated Codes of Practice, but also through ECHR/ECtHR and the UK’s signature of the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (known as OPCAT), which as has led to a programme of inspections of police custody facilities by HMIP and HMIC. Improvements have also been made to the custody environment and to the kind of people who work there, which all have the potential to provide a more humane experience for suspect in the police station, through civilianization and privatization, as well as through technology such as CCTV.

However, various aspects of policing have remained unchanged including the existence of considerable amounts of police discretion which, in combination with the inherent permissibility of the law (McBarnet, 1979), enables the occupational cultures of the police to exert significant influence over police decision-making and actions. What has also remained unchanged is the role that the police occupy in society. In relatively consensual and peaceful democratic societies, this role concerns the exercise of authority backed up by the capacity (i.e. the possibility) of using force. That is, the police have at their disposal discretion about the deployment of legitimate force to control 'something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-someone-had-better-do-something-now!' (Bittner, 1974).

These ‘new’ and the ‘old’ aspects of policing co-exist alongside and conflict with each other. Moreover, the clash between the new and the old has been intensified as a result of social, political and economic changes in the post-war period, which have left the police in a precarious position, as evidenced by declining trust in the police and as the police have struggled to adapt to the changing world around them.

Together this is what is meant by plus ça change and it is all manifest in police custody, a micro-cosm of policing. This was the main focus of my talk, evidenced with reference to the data that I collected in my ESRC-funded police custody study in 2006/7. In sum, custody environments are much improved, but they are still concerned with asserting power and control, as well as with the deprivation of liberty, meaning that suspects are still at risk from what I have called the ‘pains of police detention’ and are likely to experience police custody as like a ‘miniature prison’. Suspects generally have better access to rights and entitlements (such as to legal advice), but the conditions of police detention and the pressure put on them by the police and others can still lead them to waive these rights so as to ‘get it over with’ as quickly as possible. Suspects form positive relationships particularly with civilian police staff, but these can be undermined by the largely coercive relationships that they continue to have with police officers, backed up by their capacity to use force.