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University of Cambridge
Institute of Criminology, Prisons Research Centre
CrimRxiv Consortium, Founding Member
The Prisons Research Centre (PRC) is part of the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology. The Centre aims to provide a lively research environment in which a coherent strategy of high-quality research can be pursued, and integration between funded and non-funded, and applied and theoretical projects can be facilitated. They investigate how prisons operate, socially, morally and operationally, how they are experienced, and the relationship between these moral and social qualities, and their effects. Members of the PRC team carry out methodologically rigorous and theoretically relevant field-based studies addressing problems of human and social values, punishment practices, and the organisation and effects of aspects of prison life. They strive to forge links with other prisons researchers, scholars in the broader fields of criminology and sociology, and with practitioners. Their vision is to develop a rigorous and person-centred model of social inquiry. Follow them on Twitter at @PrisonsResearch.
Published: Oct 11, 2024
While there is abundant literature on prison violence, much less has been written about how safety is perceived and conceived in prison. Even less is known about how these feelings of safety and their respective predictors may vary between prison systems. This study ...
Published: Mar 18, 2024
Performance thresholds and minimum standards in prison have preoccupied policy makers andpractitioners alike for some time. These standards are based on widely accepted statements ofprinciple, but benchmarks are rarely set or explored empirically. Nor has there been any ...
Published: Mar 08, 2024
One of the striking characteristics of comparative prison scholarship is that it has tended to stop at the gates of the prison, drawing on relatively abstract measures, like prison population rates, which give no sense of what imprisonment is actually like or how it varies. ...
Published: Jan 24, 2024
Based on a longitudinal study of life-sentenced prisoners in England and Wales, this article seeks to make sense of what it characterizes as ‘sedative coping’. In doing so, it brings together analytic conclusions from the existing research literature that appear highly ...
Published: Oct 10, 2023
Satisfaction from police performance in cases that are screened out from police investigation is low, particularly for victims who report online. In a randomized controlled trial, we report the impact of reassurance telephone callbacks on satisfaction scores for victims of ...
What is trauma-informed practice? Towards operationalisation of the concept in two prisons for women
Published: May 25, 2023
A cultural initiative, ‘Becoming Trauma-Informed’, was introduced into prisons in England and Wales from 2015 based on the work of American clinical psychologist, Dr Stephanie Covington, and as part of a more general trend towards the recognition and treatment of ...
Published: May 05, 2023
Staff–prisoner relationships have long been recognised as lying ‘at the heart of the whole prison system’ (Home Office, 1984: para. 16; Liebling, 2011). However, relatively few accounts of women's imprisonment have focussed on staff–prisoner relationships specifically, ...
Published: Jan 24, 2023
Recent decades have seen a widespread effort to imprison more people for sexual violence. The Stains of Imprisonment offers an ethnographic account of one of the worlds that this push has created: an English prison for men convicted of sex offenses. This book examines the ...
Published: Dec 05, 2022
Extreme forms of custody represent the boundary points of state power. The configuration of the most restrictive corners of prison systems, and what goes on within them, is highly instructive in exposing the objectives, limits, and implications of state coercion at its most ...
Published: Mar 31, 2022
Retaining participants in longitudinal studies is important but challenging when retracing them after a substantial gap between study phases. Utilising our nine year mixed-methods longitudinal study of 54 families affected by paternal imprisonment, we qualitatively analysed ...
Published: Mar 28, 2022
Based on a survey administered in 13 prisons in England & Wales and Norway, as part of a research programme with explicitly comparative aims, this article seeks to address both the relative and absolute dimensions of the Nordic penal exceptionalism thesis. It outlines the ...
Published: Mar 05, 2022
This article explores how men serving mandatory life sentences in England and Wales anticipate life after release and the imposition of a life licence. It reports the various ways that lifers feared licencing as being exceedingly ‘tight’ and restrictive, sometimes resulting ...
Published: Mar 01, 2022
Ed Cornmell is HMPPS Prison Gold Commander in charge of organising prisons to respond to COVID. He is interviewed by Professor Ben Crewe, who is based at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Published: Feb 02, 2022
Sociological studies of prisons require expanded methodologies and interdisciplinary concepts to address challenges posed by changing prisoner demographics and transformed geopolitics. We aim to revitalize sociological inquiry on prisons and prisoner leadership by focussing ...
Published: Jan 17, 2022
Drawing on Snyder's ‘hope theory’ as a conceptual framework, this article examines the hope narratives of men and women at the ‘late stage’ of a life sentence. The article aims to bridge the existing gap between jurisprudence and sociological accounts on hope and life ...
Published: Jul 14, 2021
The politics involved in cell-sharing reach into the most personal parts of prisoners’ lives and are highly determinate of their experiences of imprisonment. While there is a small amount of research on the impact of cell-sharing on personal wellbeing and prison quality, much ...
Published: May 28, 2021
Comparative penologists have described neoliberal and social democratic jurisdictions as though they exist at opposite ends of a continuum of inclusion and exclusion, and as though neoliberal states are inactive and social democratic states are invasive. This article, which ...
Published: Apr 23, 2021
This article has three main purposes: (1) To describe an in-prison methodology for measuring the moral quality of life, developed organically out of experience and necessity. It is conducted over an intense but exceptionally brief period of time. (2) To reveal and reflect on ...
Published: Apr 22, 2021
Recent calls from senior managers, human rights groups and academics continue to scrutinize the impact of solitary confinement. But much less attention has been paid to prisoners’ own motivations for segregation. By analysing interviews with 16 segregated men in a ...
Published: Feb 08, 2021
The so-called ‘wall of silence’ presents a threat to successful police investigations and criminal trials. Explanations for it have focused on cultural narratives, including distrust in the police, a ‘no snitching’ culture and manipulative ‘professional criminals’. Drawing on ...
Published: Dec 09, 2020
Interviews were undertaken with participants drawn from four groups: police detectives; criminal lawyers; young people in the community (aged 25 and under); and prisoners, convicted when young (aged 25 years old and under) of serious violence using the principles of joint ...
Published: Nov 18, 2018
University of Cambridge, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Director of the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre
