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. She has extensive expertise in prisons, having carried out research on wide-ranging topics including suicide and self-harm, close supervision centres for difficult prisoners, incentives and earned privileges, staff-prisoner relationships, the location and building of trust in high security prisons, the work of prison officers, and conceptualizing and measuring the moral quality of prison life, including comparative work between public and private sector prisons. She has carried out two evaluations of music projects (gamelan and HOOT Creative Arts) and an evaluation of shared reading programmes in Psychologically-Informed Planned Environments for prisoners with personality disorders. The ‘moral climate’ survey she developed with Helen Arnold and others has been used or adapted internationally in many penal systems. Her books include Prisons and their Moral Performance: A Study of Values, Quality and Prison Life (2004, OUP), The Effects of Imprisonment (2005, edited, with Shadd Maruna, Willan Publishing), Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: An International Exploration (2013, OUP; edited with Justice Tankebe); Crime, Justice and Social Order (2022, OUP, edited with Shapland, Sparks and Tankebe) and The Prison Officer (2001, and 2nd edition 2011). She is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. She held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2020-23) to carry out the project, ‘Moral rules, social science and forms of order in prison’. The results from that project form the basis of her new book, Aristotle's Prison: A Search for Humanity in Tragic Places (OUP, April 2026).