Interview with Andy Sleight, MSt in Applied Criminology, Penology and Management

Can you briefly summarise your time at the Institute of Criminology?

It was absolutely fantastic.

I was prompted by my then-governor at HMP Wakefield. I will say that on the Sunday evening when I drove down to Cambridge for the first two-week session block, I was so anxious about going to Cambridge. I didn't come from an academic background. I'd been in the prison service for 25 years at the time, and I wasn't really sure why I was doing it in truth.

But I've got to say, it was the best thing I ever did. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it.

I met a lot of people who worked in different parts of criminal justice. It wasn't just prisons- there were a lot of non-prison people on the course, probation officers, lawyers, and so on. It was fantastic.

I loved being at Cambridge. I'd never been before, and the city itself was brilliant. I loved taking my family down at weekends, wandering around the colleges, and having access to all of them with the student card.

The study part was not what I was expecting. Obviously, that's what we were there for. Writing essays, writing my thesis, doing all the references, that was difficult for me at first. But eventually I got into it, and there were plenty of people to ask. My supervisor was Ben Crewe, who I'm still in touch with. He was a great help, I felt very fortunate I had him as a supervisor.

I also loved being a mature student with an income. I had money and could go to the pub. We went to the pub most nights as a group.

What convinced you to study Criminology at Cambridge?

I didn't really have a lot of say in it, which is why I was as anxious as I was.  My governor suggested I do it because we were a group of eight deputy governors, and a couple of us always seemed to be sat at the back of various events that we went to. I always felt that some of the other academics in the group were able to better articulate some of the things we were talking about. The governors were really keen that I did this just to prove to myself, that I could talk like those others about theory behind our plans.

Can you briefly describe your thesis?

I didn't have a thought about my thesis when I started. But I was really taken by some of the lessons that we had with Justice Tankebe, about legitimate use of authority.

That really struck a chord with me: I worked at HMP Wakefield, and the prison inspectorates had criticised its conditions and culture. It's very overbearing, and this has been the case for years. The authority wasn't used legitimately- it was strict for the sake of being strict. That really struck a chord when we started learning about the different theories around legitimacy.

I started to question some of that theory, in that some of the people we researched were adamant that they were not guilty. A lot of sex offenders do claim to be not guilty, and there are different theories around that. I wanted to look into whether that stance of not being actually guilty affected a prisoner's perception of the prison’s legitimacy.

So, what I was looking at was, does it matter whether you use your authority legitimately? If somebody is adamant that they're not guilty, you will always be on the back foot where legitimacy is concerned. That’s their perception. That was the basis of it, and I found it to be really interesting.

What have you gone on to do since completing your MSt?

You expect people to go to university, get qualifications, get a good grounding in knowledge and then go on to do bigger things. I was a deputy governor at the time and recently retired from that position, so I don't think it advanced my career in that sense.

But what it did do was enable me to talk to groups of staff and groups of prisoners about legitimacy and use knowledge from different theories. These were things I already knew but didn't realise there were theories for them. A lot of it was common sense, but I was able to talk more articulately to groups of people about why legitimate use of authority is important in a prison setting.

I quickly realised that you had to put it into prison officer talk. If we use the word rehabilitative culture, for example, you turn prison staff off. So, it's about taking the principles of that theory and dressing them up differently. It's more readily accepted then.

But all this was underpinned by the knowledge I'd learnt from my MSt.

What advice would you give to somebody who was starting your course?

Grab every moment. Attend every lecture. Attend all of the additional lectures, some of them in the evenings. Go to your supervisors, listen to their advice. If you're not sure about something, ask them. A lot of the prison staff that attend Cambridge for the MSt actually have really good understanding of prisons. But they probably don’t know that they have a good understanding of the different theories they’re exposed to at Cambridge. I found a lot of moments to be eye openers: moments where I thought ‘well, yeah, I know all about this’. But to know that there's a theory that underpins it, that you can hang your hat on, I found that really helpful.

Apply yourself to it, do the work. I didn't always do that. I was a very last-minute person, and my thesis was barely started by the end of October. It had to be submitted on 31 December, so I had to absolutely cram it in. So spread it out into bite size pieces of work. But you've got to apply yourself.

But it is a fantastic experience. In the first couple of days, I was intimidated by the thought of it. You soon settle into it and it's brilliant.