In this country, largely thanks to the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, there is still a kind of doomed romance that hangs around the drunk tank. But it won't last long. Today, the Association of Chief Police Officers has given its support to government plans for Britain's first "welfare centres", as chief constable Adrian Lee prefers to call them, where troublesome, intoxicated people could be left to sober up safely.
As it stands, the idea is for drunk tanks to be run privately by a company that would bill people for the cost of their care, a figure that would probably run to hundreds of pounds. Any fines or charges from the police would then be applied on top of that, and the whole scheme, it is claimed, would bring big savings in police and NHS time, as well as reducing harm by ensuring drunk people are looked after, and off the streets. Even if it becomes a badge of honour to spend a night in a drunk tank, it will be one that most people cannot afford too often.
Signs are that the plan is popular, and it is fairly close to how things are already done around the world. The phrase "drunk tank" comes from the US, where they are common, but the idea of a special cell for drunk people came from eastern Europe, where they are known officially as "sobering stations".
The first one is said to have been established in Prague in 1951 by the psychiatrist Jaroslav Skala. Its debut customer was a Russian naval engineer, and in the three months of its initial trial it was only empty for three days. Plumbers were the most common "visitors", according to the tank's records, which were kept until its closure in 2004, followed by authors of children's poetry. (Perhaps one author, you suspect, who visited very regularly.)
After that, the idea caught on widely behind the iron curtain, always state-run of course. Today some are private, and not all are managed very sympathetically, yet many of eastern Europe's drunk tanks still struggle to cover costs. In Poland, for instance, the number of them has halved since the mid-1990s.
Elsewhere, however, they are gaining ground. Just a couple of months ago a year-long trial of drunk tanks began in Sydney, cleverly making use of courthouse cells left empty over the weekend. In that scheme, the cost of using one begins at AU$200 and rises with each successive visit. Don't get too drunk, is the moral of the story. And if you can't manage that, and want to save money, check into a hotel.
