Accessibility and barriers for disabled people in police custody: listening to the missing voices of disabled suspects

In this paper we examine the nature of police custody as a carceral space as it is experienced by disabled people. The police custody environment can offer the possibility for intervention when a disabled person is in crisis; the suspect can experience diversion, support, and a reaffirmation of their place in society. More often however, disabled suspects experience custody negatively. Custody spaces and processes present a range of disabling barriers which when taken together produce a physical, temporal, and emotional space of disempowerment, liminality, and loss of control.

The voices of disabled people, though well established as participants in other dialogues relating to services for them, are missing here (Macdonald et al, 2020). In this paper we present the voices and perspectives of disabled people in order to consider how they experience and describe the custody environment. We outline the specific barriers that are identified, and we apply a social model of disability to consider possible adjustments which could be made.