Professor Ben Crewe

I joined the Institute in 2001, as a post-doctoral fellow, having trained as a sociologist as an undergraduate at Cambridge, a Masters student at London School of Economics, and a PhD student at the University of Essex. I am interested in almost all aspects of prison life, in particular the prisoner experience, prison social life and culture, penal power, staff-prisoner relationships, prison management and penal policy, prison quality, and the impact of political, economic and cultural factors on the nature of imprisonment. I welcome interest from PhD students who wish to conduct research in these areas. I am particularly interested at the moment in projects that look to develop or apply the concepts of ‘depth’, ‘weight’, ‘tightness’ and ‘breadth’ as they relate to prison life in the UK and overseas.

My recent research projects include a five-year, €2 million research project titled 'Penal policy making and the prisoner experience: a comparative analysis', which involved extensive fieldwork in England & Wales and Norway and an ESRC-funded study of prisoners serving very long sentences from an early age (with Susie Hulley and Serena Wright). From January 2026, I will be using a one-year Leverhulme Fellowship to write up the second wave of interviews that we undertook for this research programme.

Previous research projects include an ESRC-funded study of values, practices and outcomes in public and private sector corrections (with Alison Liebling) and a NOMS-funded study of the role of prison governors (with Alison Liebling).

I was one of the founding editors of the journal Incarceration, and am an International Associate Board member of Punishment and Society and Theoretical Criminology. I am also one of the series editors of Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology (with Yvonne Jewkes and Thomas Ugelvik) and a Trustee of the Prison Reform Trust.