ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the conditions and procedures of contemporary police detention conveyed to detainees a sense of coercive control by the police. It examines staff perceptions of the formal and more explicit rules of police detention that is, the law and police policies and how this impacted on police decision-making about detainees. The chapter reviews the more informal and implicit rules, that is, some of the beliefs, values and norms about how police detention work should be performed. It argues that though the formal, legal rules were a source of criticism from time to time, in the Irish, Australian and English cities, staff worked with a profound sense of their importance to what they did and how they did it. Booking-in was a relatively similar affair across the detention facilities in the cities in the research. The corollary to the suspiciousness that police officers showed towards detainees and those who helped them was a sense of solidarity amongst staff.
