News

 PhD student Cheryl Peng believes that psychopathy can play an important role in risk assessment. But in China, she says, there is no common equivalent term. Her research aims to address this gap by studying how psychopathy may look different across cultures. She is developing a new psychometric tool to measure psychopathic traits in Chinese popula…

Youth violence is not just an individual problem — it is a network problem. A new analysis from the Violence Research Centre mapped co-offender data from more than 200,000 UK police records. The findings reveal that adolescents aged 10-18 embedded in criminal networks are more likely to carry knives and commit violent crime, as well as become victi…

 The Institute’s 2026 PhD Conference took place on 28-29 April, on the subject of ‘Critical Crossroads? A criminology that confronts’.Over two days, 49 PhD students from both Cambridge and other institutions gave presentations and took part in panel discussions about how criminologists could approach issues such as displacement, colonialism, violen…

PhD student Noëlle Demole is currently completing her research project on sex trafficking of women in Europe. For her, this research project is one part of a much wider interest in women’s health and safety, which has guided her throughout her career. “I’ve been interested, ever since I was young, in talking with vulnerable people,” says Demole, wh…

PhD student Bradley Read is devoting his research to understanding the parole system in England and Wales as it operates today and what, if any, reforms could make it fairer. Read was originally a senior manager in prisons for 14 years. In this time, he led several departments across several different prisons, from Offender Management Units to Dive…

Our MPhil has always provided a foundational education in prominent criminological theories, research methods, and areas of criminological knowledge.  From 2027, students can follow a general criminology pathway or choose to specialise in one of three new strands:Crime: Causes, Patterns, and HarmsCriminal Justice: Ethics, Players and InstitutionsCr…

Image Source: By Andrew Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4867433Article by Professor Barak Ariel - Director of the MSt in Applied Criminology and Police Management (also known as the Police Executive Programme) and Professor Manuel Eisner - Director of the Institute of CriminologyMSt in Applied Criminology and Po…

Mark Yin, a PhD student at the Institute of Criminology, conducted research that found adolescents in conflict with the law had very little say in the decisions affecting them. These findings put Australia’s justice system at odds with practice in other youth services, as well as Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.Yin became…

Andrzej Uhl, PhD student and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the Institute of Criminology, has conducted new research into ‘noise’ among judges and its consequences for the defendants. He found evidence that different judges varied wildly in the sentences they proscribed, even for identical cases.This research paper,produced in collaboration with Justin…

Can you summarise your time as a student at the Institute of Criminology?I joined the MSt in Criminology and Police Management in 2012 along with 30 other students from the UK, Sweden, the USA, Trinidad and Tobago, India and Australia. I recall feeling a mixture of slight apprehension and awe, on first arriving at this very prestigious learning ins…

Dr Sarika Dewan, a former PhD student at the Institute of Criminology, recently contributed to international efforts to measure technology-facilitated violence linked to femicide. Her work as a consultant contributes to a global statistical framework developed by UN Women and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).Violence against wom…

Sidharth Luthra, senior advocate and former MPhil student at the Institute of Criminology, accepted the K L Arora Chair at the National Law University in Delhi in July 2025. This chair was created to promote teaching, research and advocacy of criminal law in India. It is named in honour of the renowned Senior Advocate Shri Kundan Lal Arora. It was …

Professor Leo Zaibert, the Andreas Von Hirsch Professor of Penal Theory and Ethics, together with Professor Alison Liebling and Professor Ben Crewe, hosted a workshop on 2-3 October 2025 titled ‘Punishment Theory Meets Punishment Practice’. The workshop centred around the contributions to a forthcoming volume with Hart, edited by Zaibert, Liebling,…

It is with great sadness that I share the news that Professor Trevor Bennett, Emeritus Professor at the University of South Wales and a long-standing member of the Institute of Criminology, passed away on 29 December, age 79.Trevor Bennett joined the Institute of Criminology in the early 1980s. He began his career in Cambridge as a Senior Research …

A framework for characterising the nature of organised crime groups, developed by Paolo Campana, Professor of Criminology and Director of the Violence Research Centre, and his long-term collaborator Federico Varese, has been widely referenced by the 2025 World Drug Report, from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.The annual report seeks to…