Interrogation Room Research Articles

An Activist in New York

Dear Yasmin, Well, here I am, finally, in New York. I landed at Kennedy on the afternoon of the 3rd. The day was wet, cold, windy, and strangely empty. All I'd ever wanted from the States was to see the maple trees in October. The brilliant scarlet of the maple leaves is supposed to be glorious. But I'll have to wait a full six months for autumn. What a shame. I encountered no problems with customs at the airport, but I was on a domestic flight, having already entered the country through Los Angeles. All the customs officers in L.A. had bullying looks and seemed extremely suspicious. I suppose that's the kind of face that superpower countries must show all new arrivals who want in. (And it seemed to me, for the first few days, that every time I went to the market, the cashiers were checking my money to see if it was counterfeit.) Even though there was a long queue, the customs officers kept on opening people's bags. When I saw a person of color taken off to a special interrogation room, that put the wind up me. I have to confess that the sight of anyone in authority is still enough to fill me with dread. I always assume that such a person is there not to preserve the peace but to disrupt it. You yourself once said something similar: that even the sight of a traffic cop makes you anxious. My sense of unease was heightened by my having not so much departed Indonesia as escaped it. I wouldn't have found it amusing if u.s. Customs had deported me because of some administrative red tape. Ferouz, my Bangladeshi friend from Human Rights Watch, was at the airport to pick me up. We went straight to the HRW office at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. HRW shares the third floor with a few other organizations with similar concerns: human rights, democracy, freedom of the press -all just ordinary problems in third-world countries. Despite HRW'S sincere concern about these problems, its office seems so remote-an entire world away. I can't imagine how the people who work there-having never experienced such problems themselves-can have a feel for what is happening so far away. Can they really believe it possible that a young woman like Marsinah might be brutally beaten and left to die for

"I'm innocent!": Effects of training on judgments of truth and deception in the interrogation room.

The present research examined the extent to which people can distinguish true and false denials made in a criminal interrogation, and tested the hypothesis that training in the use of verbal and nonverbal cues increases the accuracy of these judgments. In Phase One, 16 participants committed one of four mock crimes (breaking and entering, vandalism, shoplifting, a computer break-in) or a related but innocent act. Given incentives to deny involvement rather than confess, these suspects were then interrogated. In Phase Two, 40 observers were either trained in the analysis of verbal and nonverbal deception cues or not trained before viewing the videotaped interrogations and making their judgments. As in past studies conducted in nonforensic settings, observers were generally unable to distinguish between truthful and deceptive suspects. In addition, those who underwent training were less accurate than naive controls—though they were more confident and cited more reasons for their judgments. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of what is known about police interrogations, false confessions, and the wrongful conviction of innocent suspects.

Built Space and the Interactional Framing of Experience During a Murder Interrogation

Human interaction and communication involve space in multiple ways. This paper examines the spatial and interactional order of a covertly video-taped police interrogation. When the participants enter the interrogation room and become engaged in the interrogation process, the room itself is a constraint and a resource for interaction. While interacting within a built environment, the participants appropriate their material surroundings in ways that constitute a spatial order and make possible certain arguments. This paper examines how the physical structure of the interrogation room is differentially appropriated, used, and filled in by the participants'; territorial and postural manoeuvers over the course of their interaction; and how the spatial structures thus created by the bodily appropriation of the physical locale are subsequently formulated by talk and thereby used as a metaphorical resource to frame the participants' situated experience. Through this embedded process, the interrogators move the suspect toward confession.

Miranda's Revenge: Police Interrogation as a Confidence Game

By requiring that police issue fourfold warnings to silence and appointed counsel prior to any custodial questioning, Miranda v. Arizona (1966) created universalistic criteria for the legal regulation of police interrogations. While Miranda appears to be partly responsible for the dramatic decline in violence in the interrogation room in the 20th century, American police have become skilled at the practice of manipulation and deception during interrogation. Drawing on more than 500 hours of participant observation fieldwork in three police departments, I argue that the sequence, structure, and process of contemporary American police interrogation can best be understood as a confidence game based on the manipulation and betrayal of trust. Understanding interrogation as a confidence game, I argue, goes a long way toward explaining (1) the paradoxical observation that criminal suspects continue to provide police with incriminating statements, admissions and confessions in the majority of cases; (2) the nature of the social interaction during interrogation more generally; and (3) how contemporary police interrogators both exercise and mystify their power inside the interrogation room.

Inside the Interrogation Room

This article takes the reader inside the interrogation room in order to analyze the characteristics, context and outcome of police interrogation practices in America. This study is the first in over twenty-five years to examine routine police interrogation practices in America through field research. The data is based on nine months of observation in a major, urban police department involving 122 interrogations and 45 detectives. It also relies on 60 videotaped custodial interrogations from two additional police departments. The article attempts to fill in the gap left by criminal interrogation scholars who have failed to employ empirical research on police interrogation practices in their studies. The article asserts that the techniques that Miranda was designed to address, such as undermining suspects' confidence in their denials and confronting suspects with fabricated evidence of their guilt, continue to be used in contemporary American police interrogations. It also suggests that interrogators have become increasingly successful at eliciting incriminating information from custodial suspects in the last thirty years. These findings confirm that interrogation methods exert a fateful effect on criminal cases at every subsequent stage in the criminal justice system.

Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War

During the early 1950s, Josephine Baker was an international star who lived in a castle in France, who wore Dior gowns in concert, and whose most radical political idea seems to have been a hope that the world might some day live in racial harmony. She would hardly seem a threat to the national security of the United States. Nevertheless, during the early fifties, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kept a file on Baker, and the State Department collected data on her activities, using the information to dissuade other countries from allowing her to perform. Baker was seen as a threat because she used her international prominence to call attention to the discriminatory racial practices of the United States, her native land, when she traveled throughout the world. Baker was caught in the cross fire of the Cold War in Latin America in the early 1950s. Her seemingly simple campaign for racial tolerance made her the target of a campaign that ultimately pushed her from the limelight of the exclusive club circuit to the bright lights of a Cuban interrogation room. The woman lauded in Havana and Miami in 1951 as an international star was arrested by the Cuban military police two years later as a suspected Communist, but she had undergone no radical political transformation in the interim. That Josephine Baker engendered an international campaign to mute her impact is a demonstration of the lengths to which the United States and its allies would go to silence Cold War critics. More important, however, Josephine Baker found herself at the center of a critical cultural and ideological weak point in American Cold War diplomacy: the intersection of race and Cold War foreign relations.1

The Role of Police in Japanese Society

Although it is beyond doubt that participation observation is one of the best methods by which to gather precise information about the role of police in Japanese society, Japanese scholars have rarely undertaken this kind of research. The sole exception has been juvenile delinquency, but even in this area Japanese scholars have failed to explore juvenile crime. Japanese police refused either to be observed or criticized by Japanese scholars, even to the point of opening the interrogation rooms, or Ryuchijyo, in police stations. Believing that the low crime rate in Japan reflected their success, police officials concluded that they had little to learn.

Military Repression in Brazil

‘. . . I persisted in denying, and they continued to give me electric shocks, kicks, blows with a rod and punches in the ribs.Once Captain Albernaz had me open my mouth to “receive the sacrament of the eucharist”. They put in an electric wire. My mouth became completely swollen, preventing normal speech. They shouted accusations against the Church, saying that priests are homosexuals because they do not marry. At 2 p.m. they finished the session. They brought me to the cell where I lay stretched out on the floor.At 6 p.m. they brought me something to eat but I could not swallow a thing since my mouth was one big wound. A few minutes afterwards, I was led to the interrogation room for an“explanation”. There I found the same team of Captain Albernaz. They asked me the same questions and repeated the same accusations. To explain my resistance to the torture, they concluded that I must be a guerilla and I was hiding my participation in attacks on banks.The questioning began again, in order to make me confess my share in the attacks: electric shocks, kicks in the genital organs and in the stomach were repeated. I was beaten with small planks of wood, cigarette butts were snuffed out on my body. For five hours I was subjected to this dog treatment. Finally they had me walk the “Polish corridor” (a torture consisting in having the prisoner pass between a double file of soldiers who are beating him all the while until he falls unconscious). I was assured that this was just a sample of what would happen to the Dominicans.