Professor Ben Crewe – Course Director

Professor Ben Crewe is Deputy Director of the Prisons Research Centre and Professor of Penology and Criminal Justice. Ben has researched widely on prisons and imprisonment, on topics including the ‘inner life’ of prisons, staff-prisoner relationships, prisoner adaptation and prison governors. He is particularly interested in how power is exerted in prison and how it is experienced by prisoners. His book (with Susie Hulley and Serena Wright) 'Long-term imprisonment from young adulthood: adaptation, identity and time' will be published in 2019, and he is currently leading a follow-up study of this research, in which he and his colleagues hope to re-interview everyone from the original project. Ben is also leading a five-year European Research Council consolidator grant, titled: penal policymaking and the prisoner experience: a comparative analysis. He is one of the founding editors of the journal Incarceration, and is an International Associate Board member of Punishment & Society and Theoretical Criminology. He is 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.

Dr Jane Dominey

Dr Jane Dominey is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice.  Her research interests include probation practice, desistance from offending, supervising offenders ‘through-the-gate’ and in the community, and the work of the penal voluntary sector.  Current and recent projects include: evaluating services for women supervisees at risk of breach and recall, staff perceptions of telephone supervision, and new developments in Integrated Offender Management.

Professor Manuel Eisner

Manuel Eisner is the Wolfson Professor of Criminology and the Director of the Institute of Criminology. He is a historian and sociologist by training, and joined the Institute of Criminology in 2000. His research revolves around the role of violence and its control in the development of human societies, and in the development of humans over the life course. He has conducted research on the history of homicide since the middles ages, and how violence is shaped by structures of power, state control, and the ways in which the self is defined by cultural forces. He is also the principal investigator of the Zurich Project on Social development from Childhood to adulthood. This is a 20-year longitudinal study of young people (and their children) who entered primary school in 2003.

Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe

Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe is Emeritus Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Loraine was Director of the Institute of Criminology from 2017-2022. She is also Director of the Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice, one of the six research centres within the Institute, and Director of the Cambridge ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership – across all the social sciences in Cambridge. Loraine has wide interests in the links between criminal justice and social justice, looking at race, gender and social exclusion, women and sentencing, and at the effectiveness of youth and community penalties in particular. Loraine also has a strong interest in research methodologies and research ethics. She is a fellow of Pembroke College.

Mr Tom Hawker-Dawson

Tom Hawker-Dawson is the Brenda Hale Fellow in Law at Girton College and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Law. His research concerns sentencing law, theory, and practice, including the legal framework in England and Wales and connections with the philosophy of punishment. He has recently focussed on the communicative dimensions of courtroom sentencing and the use of Prison Court Video Links. This involved conducting interviews with Crown Court judges and observing sentencing hearings in order to develop a framework for understanding communicative practices in court. His criminological interests extend further to include technology and criminal justice more generally, as well as public attitudes regarding crime and punishment.

Dr Susie Hulley

Dr Susie Hulley is a Senior Research Associate in the Prisons Research Centre. She has worked on various projects, including an examination of staff and prisoner quality of life in private and public prisons. She has co-led a major study of the experiences of men and women serving long life sentences, which they received when they were young, and a ground-breaking study of practitioners’ and young people’s conceptions of friendship and violence in the context of joint enterprise. She is currently Co-Investigator on the follow-up study of men and women serving long life sentences, which aims to revisit interviewees involved in the original research to understand their experiences over time

Dr Alice Ievins

Alice is a Lecturer is Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool, and prior to that she was a Research Associate at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. Her research revolves around punishment, in particular the imprisonment of men convicted of sex offences, but also the relationship between punishment, penal theory and the anthropology of ethics.

Dr Caroline Lanskey

Dr Caroline Lanskey is a University Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice and a deputy director of the Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice.  After an earlier career in teaching and educational research she joined the Institute of Criminology in 2006. Her research interests stem from her cross-disciplinary experience of education and criminology and include youth justice, education and the arts in criminal justice, citizenship and migration, the experiences of prisoners' families and research methodologies. Over the past fifteen years she has worked on a number of research projects including an evaluation of a training intervention for staff in secure settings for young people; a study of the education pathways of young people in the youth justice system, a historical review of safeguarding children in the secure estate and an evaluation of restorative prison and probation programmes in Hungary, Germany, Latvia and Bulgaria. She recently led the Families and Imprisonment Research (FAIR) Study (www.fair.crim.cam.ac.uk) and is currently co-leading three research projects:  Inspiring Futures an evaluation of the role and meaning of arts programmes in criminal justice (www.if.crim.cam.ac.uk);  a research study of youth justice and rurality with Dr Joel Harvey and an evaluation of the National House Project.

Professor Alison Liebling

Alison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge and the Director of the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre. Alison has extensive research expertise in prisons, leading studies on wide-ranging topics including suicide and self-harm, close supervision centres, incentives and earned privileges, staff-prisoner relationships, the location and building of trust in high security prisons, the work of prison officers, and measuring the moral quality of prison life, including comparative work between public and private sector prisons. Her books include Prisons and their Moral Performance, The Effects of Imprisonment, and The Prison Officer. She has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2020-22) to carry out the project, ‘Moral rules, social science and forms of order in prison’

Professor Fergus McNeill

Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow where he works in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and in Sociology. Prior to becoming an academic in 1998, Fergus worked for a decade in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker. His many research projects and publications have examined institutions, cultures and practices of punishment and rehabilitation and their alternatives. Currently, Fergus is working on ‘Distant Voices: Coming Home’ which is a major, multi-partner 3-year Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council project exploring re-integration after punishment through creative practices and research methods. His most recent books include ‘Reimagining Rehabilitation: Beyond the Individual’ (with Lol Burke and Steve Collett) and ‘Pervasive Punishment: Making sense of mass supervision’.

Professor Nicola Padfield

Nicola Padfield is Professor of Criminal and Penal Justice at the Law Faculty, University of Cambridge, where she has worked for more than 30 years.  She was Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge from 2013 - 2019 and is now a Life and Honorary Fellow.  She has a broad research lens, engaged in both ‘hard’ law and in socio-legal-criminological research. She is a leading European expert on sentencing law, including the law and practice of release from (and recall to) prison.  A barrister by training, she has published widely on criminal law, sentencing and criminal justice. Her books include The Criminal Justice Process: Text and Materials (5^th edition, 2016); Criminal Law (10^th edit, 2016); Beyond the Tariff:  Human rights and the release of life sentence prisoners (2002).  She has edited collections of essays, and was for many years the editor of the influential monthly Archbold Review.  She sat as a Recorder (part-time judge) in the Crown Court from 2002-2014, and is a Bencher of the Middle Temple, where she chairs the Education and Training Committee.  Her main project at the moment is on the effectiveness of inquests.

Dr Bethany Schmidt

Dr Bethany Schmidt is a Lecturer in Penology within the Prisons Research Centre. Her work explores the moral, social, and political dimensions of prison life. She leads several research projects aimed at refining and adapting Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (MQPL) in a variety of different contexts, including in longitudinal and international studies. Her particular research interests lie in the sociological intersections of democracy, citizenship, and punishment. Bethany is in the midst of an ongoing study of Tunisian prisons, following the country’s democratic revolution in 2011. She, in partnership with Dr Andrew Jefferson from the Danish Institute Against Torture (DIGNITY), have recently written a chapter on ‘sensing transition’ in post-revolutionary prisons in Tunisia for the new collection Sensory Penalities: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control (2021; Emerald Publishing), which was co-edited by Bethany.

Dr Justice Tankebe

Justice Tankebe is a Lecturer in Criminology. His interests lie in policing, legitimation and legitimacy, organisational justice, corruption, vigilantism and extra-legal punishment, comparative criminology, sociology of law, crime and criminal justice in sub-Saharan Africa. His current research projects include work that is exploring legitimacy and counter-terrorism policing, corruption among prospective elites, sentencing decision-making in Ghana, the death penalty in Africa, and police self-legitimacy.

Dr Lucy Willmott

Dr Lucy Willmott is a Teaching and Research Associate at the Institute of Criminology. Lucy’s interests are cross disciplinary, covering programme design, development and evaluation; the treatment and management of patients and prisoners with personality disorders, formerly on the specialist high security units and now across the PD pathway.  She also has a strong interest in the politics of prison and probation policy.

Dr Ali Wigzell

Ali is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Criminology. Her research interests include youth justice, the professional relationship, community supervision, emotions in criminal justice, and desistance from offending. She is currently leading a research study, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Isaac Newton Trust, exploring the nature of care and its ethical dimensions in youth justice across custody and the community in England and Wales. Prior to joining the Institute, Ali worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Criminal Policy Research (ICPR), Birkbeck, University of London. Here she was involved with studies on a range of topics, from the impact of restorative justice training in prisons and probation services, to the effect of the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction on the use of evidence in policing.

Senior Graduate Coordinator

Di Kennedy

The Senior Graduate Coordinator has overall responsibility for the MSt, MPhil and PhD courses at the Institute. She is based in Room 1.2, which is on the first floor of the building, and you are welcome to drop in or contact her by email or phone with any questions you may have.

Email:sgc@crim.cam.ac.uk

Phone: +44 (0)1223 335367

MSt Course Administrators

Sara Tattam and Emma Challis

Sara and Emma are your first point of contact for any course queries. They are based in the MSt Office (Room 1.1), which is on the first floor of the building, and you are welcome to drop in or contact them by email or phone with any questions you may have.

Email: mst.administration@crim.cam.ac.uk

Phone: +44 (0)1223 767339

Librarian

Stuart Stone

Stuart, together with his team, curate our world-leading collection. The Library staff are always happy to support you to make the most of our resources within the library, both print and electronic. When you are in Cambridge, they will be happy to discuss any help you need, otherwise you can contact them by email at any time.

Email: crimlib@hermes.cam.ac.uk       

Phone: +44 (0)1223 33538