Ruth Armstrong - Biography

	Contact Details
	Email: ra299@cam.ac.uk

Ph.D. Working Title: Examining the re-entry of ex-prisoners released from a faith-based prison unit.

I graduated in Law with American Law from the University of Nottingham and the University of Texas in 2001. While in Texas I got involved with death row work, and hence prison. This eventually steered my course out of a commercial law firm in Mexico City and back towards criminology via a little look at murder and its partial defences in the Law Commission of England and Wales. In 2004 I completed the MPhil in criminological research at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge, undertaking the pilot study which became the basis for my Ph.D. My Ph.D uses a mixed methods approach to examine the re-entry of ex-prisoners released from a faith-based prison unit. My fieldwork for this longitudinal project involved 18 months in the USA spending time with 48 men following their release from a faith based prison.

I have taught both Criminal Law and Sentencing and the Penal System at Kings College London and the University of Cambridge. While at Cambridge I have helped to set up and run both the Texas Defender Service Internship (which sends students to work as death penalty interns in the USA each year) and the Cambridge University Innocence Project (where undergraduate students investigate alleged miscarriages of justice).