Alumni Interview with Ali Jebari

Can you summarise your time at the Institute of Criminology?

I didn't do my undergraduate degree at Cambridge. I did undergrad in the US at Harvard. There, criminology - like at Cambridge - isn't an undergraduate course. So, in a way, what was nice was that everyone came to criminology from different fields. Everyone came in fresh to the subject.

I had studied philosophy, others had studied law, politics, psychology, sociology. So that made for a really interesting makeup of people. I think that's a beautiful thing about criminology, the multidisciplinary aspect of that particular subject, which was acknowledged and understood.

What convinced you to study Criminology?

I always had an interest in political theory, and why is it that we think it is OK collectively to put people in prisons. For me, prisons were a big part of my interest in criminology. In criminology, you can, of course, study the reasons people end up committing crimes, but another related field of criminology is punishment theory. This is what I focused on.

I came in from a more theoretical, philosophical take on criminology and criminal justice.  What I wanted from Cambridge was something more foundational, rooted in statistics, social sciences, and even neurobiology. I wanted these aspects to substantiate some of what I had learned in philosophy. And I absolutely got that and more.

Why did you decide to come to Cambridge?

It was really a bunch of different reasons.

Cambridge has very different levels. You've got your college, you've got the university, you've got the departments, and all three of them were aligned with what I wanted from a postgrad experience.

A big part of it was also the collegiate system. I think it is just so wonderful, creating a community at the level of the college. I was at Emmanuel, and I had a wonderful, wonderful time. And then with the Institute of Criminology itself, it's essentially knowing that there were practitioners at the Institute who were really top of their fields, not only in the UK, but globally. I had read some of them as an undergrad and knowing that I could take a class and get it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, was something that was so interesting for me.

What was the most important thing criminology taught you?

I think the big invaluable lesson from the Institute of Criminology is that we can be absolutely wrong in how we approach science.

Criminology is a very interesting subject because there's a way of doing it that's critical and that is self-reflective. And I think that is the correct way of doing it. But criminology wasn't always done that way. It used to be done in a way that fuelled racist theories about crime. And to think that some of that used to be part of science just makes you think about how scientific inquiry also means being brave enough to be willing to change the paradigm.

Criminology is also a very unique scientific subject in that it's very political. Having to combine science and politics requires skills that are very much transferable outside criminology. Because once you enter a job market, regardless of what you do, you're going to be combining your technical skills with navigating a political structure, whether it’s your firm or your government office.

That’s something you learn in criminology right from the beginning. Because the people who make the decisions about prisons and punishment aren’t always the scientists who study those things.

Can you describe your thesis?

I wrote a thesis that was primarily theoretical. I came in from that perspective, and I had two intuitions about my thesis. The first one is that an equal crime should trigger an equal punishment. Let’s say you and I rob a bank together. When we do the exact same thing, then we should get the same sentence. And my second intuition is that what matters about punishment is the subjective experience. So, when you're in prison, what matters is the way your senses are essentially violated while you are being held.

And because everyone experiences things around them differently, everyone is getting punished unequally. My thesis was about can we create, or should we even create a type of punishment that is tailored to everyone's own individual experience, to make it fair?

That's the premise, but I talked a lot about how it's really hard to measure how we experience things. It's also very hard to make it fair. You might have had a very difficult life that has given you a lot of resilience, and you might be very tough, and you might not care about bad food and not seeing your parents. But that doesn't mean we should give you a longer sentence because you've built all that resilience, right? If you're very insensitive, if you're very hard to punish, are we justified in punishing you more so we can punish you the same?

While I was navigating that, I cannot say enough nice things about my dissertation supervisor Leo Zaibert. He took my idea and just kept pushing and challenging me. My entire third chapter was basically a tribute to that, to our relationship and to the way we were thinking about those topics together, in a sort of dialectical way, over the year.

What have you gone onto since graduating?

I live in Paris now, and I work in a law firm that does mostly corporate and corporate-related law. So M&A, antitrust, litigation, tax, and a bit of criminal law.

I was recruited by an alumnus of the University of Cambridge on Handshake. That's a job posting website that the university has a partnership with. I applied, and we had a little chat. I knew that I wanted to live in Paris.

So now I do corporate law. It's very different from criminology or criminal law. Sometimes it feels like an entirely different field, like I could be doing astrophysics right now. But amazingly, I don’t feel underprepared at all. I was able to come into Cambridge and build this dissertation from the ground up. That's very much the same thing that I do today, on my corporate law job.

September 2024