Professor Roy King 1940 - 2025

Obituary for Roy D. King, aged 85.

Professor Roy King was Emeritus Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology, which he had joined in 2003. He passed away on 3 June at the age of 85.

Roy was a student on the Institute’s second Diploma in Criminology course in 1965, graduating with Distinction. He completed his Ph.D at the London School of Economics. Roy held a lectureship and senior lectureship at the University of Southampton from 1967 to 1979. He then occupied a Chair in Criminology and Criminal Justice, at the University of Wales, Bangor (1979-2004), where he founded the Centre for Comparative Criminology and Criminal Justice.

At the LSE Roy joined the distinguished research team of Raynes and Tizard studying the manner in which the development of children in care is affected by the differential regimes to which they are subject. Their book, King, Raynes and Tizard Patterns of Residential Care (1971) summarised their influential findings. How residents in institutions respond to the regimes to which they are subject was the sociological question he addressed throughout his career.

While at Southampton Roy was appointed a Home Office advisor on prison design and regimes and became a founding member of the Parole Board (1967-74, second term 2001-7). He acquired a series of Home Office and ESRC research grants to study every aspect of daily prison life in establishments ranging from open to maximum security. The fieldwork was undertaken against the backcloth of the 1967 Mountbatten Report which, following several high-profile escapes, recommended that there be built a single high security prison in which could be concentrated the relatively small number of prisoners whose character was such that their escape must be made impossible. Mountbatten’s recommendation was rejected by the Government in favour of what became known as the ‘dispersal’ system wherein all security categories could be held in high security conditions  for the dispersal of a few high security prisoners. Roy advised against this system arguing prisoners should be held in the lowest security conditions necessary and that prisoners be categorised separately according to escape and control risks. He advised this as a member of the Prison Service Control Review Committee’s Research and Advisory Group, and later of the Advisory Group on Close Supervision Centres (subsequently renamed the Advisory Group on Dangerous Prisoners) but the Control Review Committee’s hopes that the dispersal system be replaced by two specialist prisons were not adopted.  He repeated this advice to Gauke’s recent Sentencing Review.

Roy also had exceptionally strong research interests in global and comparative criminology, especially on super-maximum-security custody around the world and systems for managing difficult and dangerous prisoners. He conducted comparative fieldwork on prisons in Britain, the United States, Europe, Russia and Brazil. In the USA and Russia, Roy was appointed a Government accredited advisor with regard to prisons, in particular high security prisons. He was a member of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons Research Advisory Group (1983-4) a Consultant to the Scottish Prison Service and a Member of the Expert Group on Dangerous Severe Personality Disorders under the auspices of the Prison Service and the Department of Health (2003-4).

Roy acted as advisor to Amnesty International on investigations into conditions on death row in the United States and on prisons, police stations and juvenile institutions in Brazil. He worked with the Council of Europe, the European Union, the Netherlands Helsinki Committee and other bodies on prison reform in Russia and several former Soviet states, and with the British Embassy and the British Council on a major change project in the prison system of São Paulo.

Roy and his research collaborators  argued in a series of books and reports (King and Morgan A Taste of Prison 1976, King and Elliott Albany: Birth of a Prison,- End of an Era 1978, King and Morgan The Future of the Prison System 1980, King and McDermott The State of our Prisons 1995) for the adoption of key principles to minimise security and integrate services in prisons with those delivered in the community. His many articles on aspects of daily life in prisons in the British Journal of Criminology, the British Journal of Sociology and in published collections of essays on imprisonment and penal policy are widely quoted.

After his ‘retirement’, Roy returned to the Institute of Criminology, becoming a Visiting Research Fellow, and Director for the MSt in Applied Criminology, Penology and Management from 2004-2011, renewing national ties with the National Offender Management Service and developing new links with international prison agencies. Roy’s approach to the directorship reflected his supervision of all his students warm and genuine welcoming all students on their first night in Cambridge to his home each year. Roy came out of retirement for the second time in 2018 to research and write his final book, The Honest Politician’s Guide to Prisons and Probation (2022, with Lucy Willmott). He felt compelled to do this research as he watched the deepening crisis in our prison and probation services following the failure to implement the recommendations of Woolf (1991) and the rebranding of probation as punishment. He sought an agenda for action informed by interviews with all former Home Secretaries, Directors and Inspectors of Service, and Lord Chief Justice. This informed his final submission to Gauke’s Sentencing Review in December 2024 – he was determined to make a difference to the end.   

Roy was twice married. His first wife, Janet, died in 2021. In 2022 he remarried. and is survived by Margaret, two sons, Simon and Mathew, and two grandchildren, Seren and Bronwyn. Roy died on 3 June 2025.

With thanks to Professor Rod Morgan, Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice, University of Bristol, for his help in compiling this obituary.