A drunk tank is a temporary holding area where police place someone who is too intoxicated to safely take care of themselves. The point is not punishment. It is keeping a person alive and off the street until the alcohol clears their system. Depending on where you are, the stay may be a civil hold with no criminal consequences, or it may follow a formal arrest for public intoxication.1Office of Justice Programs. Decriminalization of Public Drunkenness – Response of the Health Care System
How Someone Ends Up in One
Police typically bring someone to a drunk tank when they find the person in a public place and clearly unable to function safely: stumbling into traffic, passed out on a sidewalk, or too disoriented to say where they live. Someone who is loud and unsteady but can still communicate might get a warning or a ride home from a friend. Someone unconscious, unable to walk, or behaving aggressively is far more likely to end up in a holding facility.
The legal authority for the detention varies by state. Where public intoxication remains a misdemeanor, officers may formally arrest the person and book them into a jail holding cell. At least 34 U.S. jurisdictions have taken a different route, following the framework of the Uniform Alcoholism and Intoxication Treatment Act and treating public drunkenness as a public health issue rather than a crime.2Office of Justice Programs. Uniform Alcoholism and Intoxication Treatment Act – Report Impact In those places, officers instead place the person in civil protective custody, a non-criminal hold designed purely to keep them safe until sober.
Officers are also supposed to consider whether the person needs medical attention rather than a cell. That judgment call matters more than most people realize, since several medical conditions can look exactly like severe intoxication.
What It’s Like Inside
The experience is deliberately spartan. On arrival, staff take your personal belongings: phone, wallet, belt, shoelaces, anything that could be used to cause harm. You go through a brief intake screening, which in better-run facilities includes a check of vital signs and a few questions about drug use or medical conditions. In a traditional jail drunk tank, that screening is often cursory.
The holding area itself is usually a bare concrete room with a bench, sometimes with a drain in the floor. Blankets are thin, lights often stay on, and privacy is minimal. Monitoring varies from facility to facility. Some check on detainees every 15 minutes, others rely on occasional glances through a window. Staff should be watching for signs of medical distress: vomiting while unconscious, difficulty breathing, seizures. Beyond water and access to a restroom, you will not receive much. A drunk tank is not a treatment facility. It is a supervised place to wait out intoxication.
How Long You Stay
Most stays last somewhere between 4 and 12 hours, roughly the time it takes a heavily intoxicated person’s body to process the alcohol. The liver metabolizes about one standard drink per hour, so someone who arrives with a very high blood alcohol concentration may need the better part of a day. Release typically happens once you can walk steadily, speak coherently, and show you are no longer a danger to yourself. Some facilities apply a structured clinical assessment. Others simply wait until the detainee appears functional.
You can often leave sooner if a sober friend or family member comes to take responsibility for you. If no one comes, staff release you once you meet their sobriety criteria. When someone’s condition suggests a deeper medical issue, such as prolonged confusion, persistent vomiting, or signs of withdrawal, the facility should transfer them to a hospital.
Stays rarely extend beyond 24 hours unless separate legal grounds apply, like pending criminal charges or a psychiatric evaluation. The 72-hour holds that sometimes come up in conversation are a different legal mechanism, involuntary psychiatric detention, not standard drunk tank procedure.
Will It Go on Your Record
That depends almost entirely on how your jurisdiction treats public intoxication. In the roughly 34 jurisdictions that have decriminalized public drunkenness, being taken to a drunk tank is civil protective custody, not an arrest.1Office of Justice Programs. Decriminalization of Public Drunkenness – Response of the Health Care System There is no booking in the criminal sense, no mugshot entered into a criminal database, and no charge that would appear on a standard background check. Once you are sober, you walk out.
In states where public intoxication is still a misdemeanor, the picture changes. Police may formally arrest you, which creates a record of the arrest even if prosecutors later decline to file charges. A conviction usually carries fines or a referral to alcohol treatment rather than jail time, but even a minor misdemeanor can surface on background checks and create complications for employment, housing applications, or professional licensing.
Conduct beyond just being drunk is treated separately. Fighting, damaging property, threatening people, or resisting an officer can result in criminal charges for those offenses even in states where the underlying intoxication is not itself a crime.
When It’s the Wrong Place
Severe alcohol intoxication, meaning alcohol poisoning, is a medical emergency that a holding cell is not equipped to handle. Someone with alcohol poisoning can choke on their own vomit, stop breathing, or go into cardiac arrest. Symptoms that call for 911 rather than a wait-and-see approach in a cell include:3Cleveland Clinic. Alcohol Poisoning Symptoms and Treatment
- Slow or irregular breathing — fewer than eight breaths per minute, or gaps of more than 10 seconds between breaths
- Seizures
- Blue-tinged or clammy skin, especially around the lips and fingernails
- Vomiting while unconscious or semiconscious, when the person cannot protect their own airway
- Extremely low body temperature
- Complete unresponsiveness, meaning the person cannot be woken by shouting or shaking
Trying to sleep off alcohol poisoning can be fatal. A person at this level of intoxication needs emergency medical care, and no amount of monitoring in a holding cell substitutes for it.3Cleveland Clinic. Alcohol Poisoning Symptoms and Treatment
Equally dangerous is the possibility that what looks like intoxication is actually a different medical crisis. Diabetic emergencies can cause slurred speech, confusion, stumbling, and breath that smells sweet or chemical, all easily mistaken for alcohol. Strokes, traumatic brain injuries, epileptic seizures, and severe low blood sugar all produce symptoms that mirror drunkenness. If there is any doubt about whether someone is dangerously intoxicated or experiencing a medical event, the emergency room is the right call.
Your Rights While Detained
People in government custody, whether under criminal arrest or civil protective custody, are entitled to adequate medical care under the U.S. Constitution. For someone held in a drunk tank who has not been criminally charged, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides the legal baseline. Federal courts have held that officers must provide objectively reasonable medical care when someone in custody faces a substantial and obvious risk of serious harm.4United States Courts – Ninth Circuit. Particular Rights – Fourteenth Amendment – Pretrial Detainee Right to Medical Care
In practical terms, a facility that ignores someone vomiting blood, having seizures, or showing signs of a head injury is violating that person’s constitutional rights. Officers and staff cannot act with deliberate indifference to serious medical needs, and courts evaluate these claims under an objective standard. It does not matter whether staff personally realized the risk, only whether a reasonable person would have recognized the need for medical intervention.4United States Courts – Ninth Circuit. Particular Rights – Fourteenth Amendment – Pretrial Detainee Right to Medical Care
You also retain the right to be free from excessive force and to be held in conditions that are not punitive. Civil protective custody is not supposed to be punishment, so the conditions should not feel like it. At minimum, facilities must provide water, restroom access, and a reasonably safe environment.
Sobering Centers Instead of Jail Cells
A growing number of cities have moved away from the jail-cell model. Sobering centers are dedicated facilities staffed by medical professionals or trained clinicians rather than corrections officers, and they exist specifically to handle intoxicated people who need supervision but not emergency care. A national survey identified at least 53 sobering centers operating across the country.5National Policing Institute. Examining the Utility of Sobering Centers
If you are picked up in a city with a sobering center, you may be taken there instead of a jail. These centers often connect people with substance use counseling, housing assistance, and outpatient treatment, services a holding cell does not provide.5National Policing Institute. Examining the Utility of Sobering Centers