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Institute of Criminology

 

Biography

Professor Roy King joined the Institute in 2003 from the University of Wales, Bangor where he was Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and where he founded the Centre for Comparative Criminology and Criminal Justice. He had previously been a Ford Foundation Research Fellow at Yale Law School and Fellow of Calhoun College, Yale University, Fulbright Fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has taught or researched at the Medical Research Council Social Psychiatry Research Unit, and the Universities of London and Southampton. He has published several books – including Albany: Birth of a prison - end of an era, A Taste of Prison, The Future of the Prison System, and The State of Our Prisons – as well as numerous articles, book chapters and conference papers mostly on prisons and imprisonment.
His current research interests are in super-maximum security custody around the world and systems for managing difficult and dangerous prisoners. He has conducted comparative research on prisons in Britain, the United States, Europe, Russia and Brazil. He has acted as advisor to Amnesty International on investigations into conditions on death row in the United States and on prisons, police stations and juvenile institutions in Brazil. He has worked with the Council of Europe, the European Union, the Netherlands Helsinki Committee and other bodies on prison reform in Russia and several former Soviet states, and with the British Embassy and the British Council on a major change project in the prison system of São Paulo.
He was a founder member of the Parole Board for England and Wales, 1968-72 and served a second term as criminologist member from 2001-7. He was a member of the Prison Service Control Review Committee’s Research and Advisory Group, and later of the Advisory Group on Close Supervision Centres (subsequently renamed the Advisory Group on Dangerous Prisoners). He acted as academic advisor to the Prison Service Working Group on the Feasibility of Supermax in the wake of the Learmong Report in 1996. His most recent book, edited with Emma Wincup, is Doing Research on Crime and Justice (2001; 2nd edition 2007).

Research

Professor King is a sociologist by training, having previously held the Chair of Social Theory and Institutions in the University of Wales. His current research interests are in super-maximum security custody around the world and systems for managing difficult and dangerous prisoners. He has conducted several comparative research studies of prisons in Britain, the United States and Russia, mostly with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, and is currently working on the influence of prison gangs in São Paulo. He has acted as advisor to Amnesty International on investigations into death row in the United States and conditions in prisons, police stations and juvenile facilities in Brazil, and worked with the Council of Europe, the European Union and the Netherlands Helsinki Committee on prison reform in former Soviet states.

Honorary Research Fellow
Professor Roy  King