Police Contact and Being Imprisoned

Abstract

There has been very little ethnographic research specifically examining drug users’ views and experiences of their contact with the police and the criminal justice system. Collison (1995) has provided one notable exception to this. He observed a local drug squad at work and collected in-depth data about their policing tactics. In his analysis, Collison adopted the metaphor of a game to describe the interactions between the police and those involved in drug-related crime. This game, he argued, involved two sets of players. These were the drug police or ‘home team’ and the drug criminals or ‘away team’. The drug police defined the rules and marked out the pitch, and it was from their perspective that Collison observed events and proceedings. Study of the away team, he speculated, was another project that would have to be approached in entirely different and potentially more dangerous ways.