Ok, well, I’ve writing a short story recently and once scene involves a police holding cell while another involves an interrogation room. I suddenly relised I’ve got no idea what either look like! So, if someone could give a discription of one or the other, information about either or maybe even pics/links to pics that may help, that would be awesome!
I imagine it depends quite a bit on the size of the precinct in question, regarding the maximum number of people that they expect to have to hold at a single time.
The typical holding cell that you see on TV isn’t too far off the mark, except that I think they are greatly enlarged for purposes of television. But basically, concrete floors and walls, with bars on one side so the officers can have an unobstructed view of the occupants. Simple benches to sit on. And that’s about it. If you’re talking about a cell where prisoners might be held for a longer period of time, there’s likely to be a toilet.
My only experience with such things has been in a small town environment; larger urban police stations might be somewhat different.
Back in high school when I got picked up, the room they used to talk to me and hold me in until my parents got there was small room, maybe 5X8, steel door with a small window. The officer DID NOT OPEN the door until he looked in the window to see where I was. It had a stainless steel table bolted to the wall and a few stainless steel bar stool type chairs mounted to the floor. The walls and floor were concrete, I have no idea what the ceiling was made of (never looked), but I’d imagine concrete and the light was probably a tamper proof fluorescent.
Basically, there’s nothing in the room that could be turned into a weapon without either tools or time. The thing is, with how small the room is, if a bad guy wanted to injure the cop it wouldn’t take much to slam his head into a concrete wall since there’s four of them pretty close by.
ETA, this was a police station in a small white collar upper middle class neighborhood. I’m willing to bet 90% of the people in that room where either there for underage drinking, drug possession, shop lifting or vandalism and most of them are probably high school kids. It’s not a town with a whole lot of high risk detainees.
Looking at a couple of TV shows like 48 Hours or Forensic Files will give you a good idea what interrogation rooms look like. They’re generally just a small room with a plain desk and two or three chairs. They appear to have doors that lock automatically and mirrors or windows that allow observation of the suspects and/or interrogation in progress by other officers not in the room. Sometimes there’s a chalk board on the wall.
Generally suspects are booked and kept in what I would think of as a typical jail cell or maybe even drunk tank if they are to be kept overnight for interrogation the next day. If they are just being kept on ice while other suspects are being questioned I believe they are simply kept inside one of the interrogation rooms.
Courtroom holding cells, I believe, are another matter. IIRC from the first O.J. trial, he was kept in a cell much like a cage right outside a side entrance to the courtroom. It was a rectangular space consisting of a three-sided cage made of metal bars set again a courthouse wall. In contained a smooth, hard wooden bench and that was about it. It was in this cell that Simpson would change from prison garb into the suits he wore at trial, and where he was kept during the times when the lawyers were arguing points of law outside the jury’s presense.
So the interrigation room is basically just a concrete box, steel door with small window?
Oh and another question, I was watching the Dark Knight yesterday and was interested in the scene where the Joker is held in an interrigation room. Do those rooms actually have 1-way glass on a wall/walls and if so, what kind of stuff would they have in there (e.g. recorders, coffee machines, etc) ?
My impression isn’t that interrogation rooms are made of concrete. They seem to be just ordinary small rooms entered from corridors alongside the detectives’ cubicles. The appear to me to be like most other rooms. Concrete isn’t really necessary as the interviewee would need considerable time and tools to break through an ordinary room’s drywall and the wooden studs holding them up. And the suspects are generally being monitored electronically as well. Plus, unless they are in an outside-facing room on the ground floor - in which case they’ll generally need to break though exterior brick or concrete walls also - all they’re likely to accomplish by breaking out of the interrogation room is to break into either another interrogation room or a cubicle farm full of suddenly ticked-off cops. 
None of the rooms I’ve seen in various cop shows (the extent of my knowledge, thankfully) have anything in them but desks and chairs. Sometimes the cops (who are usually detectives) will bring in coffee or soft drinks or bottles of water for themselves and will occasionally ask the detainee if he or she would like something to drink as well, but they don’t always do this. Foam cups and/or plastic bottle seem to be the order of the day where these types of drinks are concerned inside the interrogation rooms.
“all they’re likely to accomplish by breaking out of the interrogation room is to break into either another interrogation room or a cubicle farm full of suddenly ticked-off cops. :D”
Lol, that was the funniest mental image I’ve had all day
and if anyone feels like it, what are the tactics police use to convince someone to …um, mental blank… say that they are guilty or otherwise?
A dialogue thing would be very helpful!
Here is a very good article explaining some of the interrogation tactics that the police can use. Also included are links to several related articles that expand on the subject further. Curiously enough I happened to be reading it just yesterday and so was able to retrieve it easily.
And I’d suggest again that if you have both the time before your story needs to be finished and access to cable or satellite TV, that you watch a few episodes of a program called 48 Hours, which generally follows detectives trying to solve murders within the first 48 hours after they discover the crime has been committed. It is supposedly during this time frame that most murders will be readily solved and so the push is on to get them solved within that time frame. You could gets lots of dialog that way. You might also try Googling dialog from episodes of the show. I’m in the middle of cooking a meal right now though and so I’ll be out of pocket for a while, maybe the rest of the night.
Good luck with your story.
Omg, thanks sooooo much, this should really help!
Btw, I’ve got no time limit, this is something for fun.
Unfortunately I can’t get cable or satellite tv >.<
And thanks for the good luck =)
Most police departments here in the US have ride-along programs where you can spend a shift in a car with the police. And they offer tours of police stations, too. Why don’t you just call your local police department and ask them?
You’re wecome on both counts. 
And btw, now that I think about it, you could always make your interrogation room concrete even if concrete isn’t necessarily the norm. The cold, hard starkness and the implicit hopelessness conveyed by concrete might add some impact to that part of your story. You know what they say - real life doesn’t always make for great entertainment. 
Very typical holding cell. Some are much larger, have wooden bench seats around the walls and can hold a large number of prisoners. This is an example of a one man temp. holding cell.
“Barney Miller” just had a cage with a bench.
Exactly. Seems to me that if you are doing research for a story you should do actual research. Not trying to be a smartass. How can you get the feel for something without actually going there. Especially if it is easy to do. It might be as easy as going to your local station and asking to look around. They might say no but you are no worse off.
The holding cell the Kansas City Missouri Police Department has is very unpleasant.
I got thrown into one for calling the Police on the “Church” of Scientology, which was running their little scam on the sidewalk in front of the McDonalds on the Plaza. Two cops showed up, one questioned the scammers, one questioned me. They, as is their wont, lied and claimed I had been screaming and yelling and I was arrested for “disturbing the peace”. So I wound up spending the night in the holding cell.
There were five cells, a large one that probably held two dozen men. Concrete floor, bars, metal benches and a TV. I was put into one of the smaller cells. It had four bunks that probably were originally intended to have mattresses, but instead were bare metal with large holes. There was a metal toilet and a sink that did not work. I did not get my phone call, the phone was supposedly “broke”. If I wanted a drink of water, I had to ask one of the guys in the large cell. Contrary to what one might imagine, almost everyone was quiet and civil.
There was one other prisoner in the cell for most of the evening, a 19 year old Mexican kid with a gunshot wound in his thigh. It was apparently part of his gang initiation - he had to shoot a rival gang member. He’d missed his intended target, but had been shot. And he was looking at a five year mandatory minimum.
I spent most of the night talking to this kid. He was actually pretty smart, and if he had been raised in different circumstances could have become an engineer. He wanted to know about technology. Neither of us could sleep because of the volume of the TV in the big cell, and much later at night a drunken asshole was put into the cell with us.
In the morning, I was taken out to videoconference with a judge. A sleepless night had the desired effect - I pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace in exchanged for time served. I had no idea if I had a public defender - I never saw anything other than the image of the judge. I just wanted to be out of the place.
I was put back into the cell for an other 30 minutes. I encouraged the kid to, if he wound up doing time, to take advantage of any educational opportunities he could get.
I could have pursued disciplinary action against the asshole cop. He threw me to the sidewalk and gave me a black eye. I could have had any number of character witnesses from my clients, including the wife of the owner of the real estate company that used to own the Country Club Plaza where I was arrested and the guy who owned the company that supplies the badges to the KCMO PD. But it would have required more time and money than I had just to turn an annoyance into an enemy.
Well…it might be a bit too much to buy a plane ticket, fly to the US and ask to spend a shift in a car with the police…Just saying =)
As far as I know, they dont do that in Aus =\
And Claude Remains ty for the pic, helps ALOT. (how on earth did u get that??)
Oh and one more quick thing:
Gaffa, that is sooo helpful! One small question, could u please define the “Church of scientology”? e.g. what where they doing, etc. Just asking coz they sound interesting =)
Ty everyone!
I’d suggest going to your local station and tell them that you are writing a story and would like to know what it looks like. The worst they would say would be ‘No.’ They can’t give you a hassle for asking what it looks like. They might even give you a quick tour, if the timing is right. The police that I met when going into a station were reasonably friendly if they weren’t busy.
I was called for jury duty, in which we were to be available for 2 days plus more if selected for a trial. I was in a room with 100+ other people waiting to be called when a bailiff came in and asked for a volunteer on a Public Instititutions Inspection panel that would last for 5 days. I figured that it would be better than sitting in there for another day and a half and maybe in court for more. We spent the week looking around hospitals, police stations and jails. We put together a report and presented it to a judge who thanked us and sent us on our way.
The sheriff stopped in on us and told us to let him know if we ever got called for jury duty again…he’d take our names of the list.
Heh. Like 30 years ago I got busted for a quarter pound. Yup. It wasn’t mine (really) but my buddy and I took the rap because the other friend (a dealer) had recently been busted and he would have done time. Since we were first timers we would get off easy.
The holding cell was 10’ square concrete block, yellow, with bars down one side and a concrete bench opposite with a guy passed out on it. Bare concrete floor that had seen more than it’s share of vomit. No sink, no toilet. We were in there about a half hour.
They fingerprinted and photographed and took shoelaces and belts, then stuck us in different rooms. Just concrete block rooms with metal doors all painted crap green. Then they said, “Your friend said it’s yours. You’re gonna do time. Give us a name.” My buddy actually fell for that and just started telling them random crap about anyone he could think of. Fact is, we really didn’t know anything because we weren’t dealers. The only guy we knew was our friend and turning him in would have defeated the entire purpose.
After a while, they stuck us in a cell with some other guys. We had just missed dinner and there were peas and carrots ALL over the concrete floor. At the top of each cell was a vent. All night long there were guys yelling through the vent at each other, “YO! YO! TYRONE! YO! What You DID MAAAAN! Dey getz me fa da colla TEEVEEEE man! Dat stoopid bitch!” (I’m not being a jerk I’m just telling you how it was.)
We got no sleep just from the noise. In the morning we got a jelly donut and some really bad coffee, shuffled up in front of the judge holding up our pants with hair sticking up and we were released on PR bond (personal recognizance, no money) as first offenders. We had to go to a drug rehab place once a week.
We got to know lots of stoners at the drug rehab. The counseler guy was a huge slacker and did no pee test or anything. Basically we got rubber stamped. Because my friend had claimed to know dealers, we got driven around to random “drug houses”, handed money and told to go in and buy. So we walked up, rang the bell and said, “Hey man, the cops are after you.” Then we got back in the car. After about 3 of these, the cops got tired of it and we were free to go.
Because we were minors (yeah, I was a bad seed) we got our records wiped clean. The entire experience was just a sad, sad joke and I was left with no respect for the law. However, getting out of jail is a fine, fine thing. The sky never looked so blue.