Governing death: A genealogy of deaths in prison and police custody

The proposed study will look at how a variety of groups including the British government, medical experts and coroners have helped build our understanding of deaths in police and prison custody. It seeks to question this construction of the topic, asking what practices and ideas it rests upon and how they emerged historically? This will involve interrogating the disparate and anarchic jumble of terms related to this topic, such as risk, vulnerability, accountability, racism, gender and more. But it does not consider these ideas on their own as they are fundamentally linked to the operation of certain physical instruments like techniques of restraint, statistics and the use of Tasers. Alike concepts of vulnerability and risk they have changed over time influencing the debate in their own unique manner and it is up to this research to trace this. Tackling the governance of deaths in custody in such a manner is rarely done in this field, most academics do not move from the present situation they interrogate towards the past (Loader, 2020; Scraton and Chadwick, 1986). Departing from these studies, the research takes a unique approach by using history to unsettle what we currently take for granted and to show things could have been otherwise. In doing so it follows Foucault's (1977) genealogical method, which uses the past to find the conditions which have made our present situation possible. The study will begin with the Angiolini Review in 2017 looking at methods of incapacitation, statistics and a variety of concepts, from there it will trace how these became an issue in relation to deaths in custody. It will do this using archival material from House of Commons debates, parliamentary reports, medical journals, coroner reports and more.