Past Events

Join Professor Ben Crewe ,

Please register in advance for this webinar:

Due the Covid-19 pandemic this event has now been cancelled.  

If you would like to register your interest please contact mst.administration@crim.cam.ac.uk

To be given by Rt Hon Mark Drakeford AM, First Minister of Wales
with respondents Richard Garside (Director, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, and Senior Visiting Research Fellow, The Open University) and Alex Osler (Director, Essex CRC)

This webinar is open to anyone interested in this topic.

If you wish to attend please register via this link:
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RsLBrVEYSZCPMMSBaQp3vQ

US policing is very heterogeneous, with 18,000 autonomous local departments, most of them small and poorly trained. Some are wonderful, many are racist, all are concerned with being respected. Most officers never do anything close to horrible. A few do, and predictably so. Which should we prefer: “pre-crime” for police dismissals before they kill citizens, or a more radical abolition of current police forces in favour of a highly educated professional body?

Recent events, such as the John Worboys case, have undermined confidence in the parole system and reopened longstanding debates over the confused normative basis of prisoner release policy and practice. Under Boris Johnson’s premiership, the Ministry of Justice have announced a review of the parole system and a series of measures intended to restrict the availability of parole for those serving custodial sentences for violent or sexual offences. In this seminar, Nicky Padfield and Thomas Guiney will discuss the changing face of prison release (and recall) in England and Wales and pose a series of fundamental questions about the implications of the process for the fairness, legitimacy and effectiveness of the penal system. At a time when prison release has become increasingly politicised, they also ask what meaningful role academic research has to play in shaping a fast-moving reform agenda.

Please join us for a Q&A session with the authors, Professor Ben Crewe, Dr Susie Hulley and Dr Serena Wright about this new book, hosted by Professor Alison Liebling.

David O'Mahony is Deputy Dean, Faculty of Humanities PGRE and Professor of Law at the University of Essex. His research focuses on the meaning of justice in the context of criminal justice systems, with particular sensitivity to the rights of individuals, the use of restorative justice and alternative ways of responding to crime. His research is based on analyses of the needs of victims, communities and offenders and he has applied a range of empirical methods to explore concepts of justice and rights in criminal justice. Together with Jonathan Doak (Nottingham Law School), he has developed a distinctive critical theory of restorative justice and its application in criminal justice systems.

Although not the focus of prison scholarship until very recently when researchers in criminology and carceral geography prompted a ‘spatial turn’ in qualitative studies of imprisonment, it is now common to highlight the spatial features of incarceration, or to note the contribution physical environment makes to the pains of imprisonment, even when the study is ostensibly about something else. Opinions are often expressed from an externalist, privilege-centric viewpoint, based on fleeting and impressionistic experiences about what incarceration in these buildings must be like.