Edited by Rachel Condry, Associate Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford, and Peter Scharff Smith, Professor in the Sociology of Law, Oslo University
Rachel Condry is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Hilda's College. She has previously been a lecturer in criminology at the University of Surrey, and a lecturer and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Families Shamed: The Consequences of Crime for Relatives of Serious Offenders (Willan, 2007), shortlisted for the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. Rachel's work focuses on the intersection between crime and the family and has included studies on the families of serious offenders, parenting and youth justice, and adolescent to parent violence.
Peter Scharff Smith is Professor in the Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo. He has previously worked at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and has been a visiting scholar and researcher at, among other places NYU and Cambridge University. He has published numerous books and articles in Danish, English, and German on prisons, punishment, and human rights, including works on prison history, prisoner's children, and the use and effects of solitary confinement in prisons. He has also written books and articles on the Waffen-SS and the Nazi war of extermination at the Eastern front. His publications include more than ten research monographs and edited collections and more than seventy articles and chapters published in Scandinavian and international journals and books.
Joyce A. Arditti is Professor of Human Development at Virginia Tech. Her research interests include family disruption, parent-child relationships in vulnerable families, and public policy. She has published numerous empirical and review articles in therapy, human services, family studies, and criminal justice journals. Joyce recently served as the editor-in-chief of 'Family Relations: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies'. Her 2012 book Parental Incarceration and the Family was awarded the 2014 Outstanding Book Award by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.
Kirsten Besemer holds a PhD in development studies. She has worked on a variety of research projects relating to poverty and social exclusion in Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Currently, she is a postdoctoral research fellow at Griffith University on the Vulnerable Families Project studying the effect of parental incarceration on children's developmental outcomes.
Johnna Christian is an associate professor at the Newark School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University. She has conducted research into incarcerated individual's familial ties, prison visitation, and prisoner reentry. She is currently studying the role of informal social support systems, such as family and faith based communities, in the reentry process.
Megan Comfort is a senior research sociologist at the Urban Health Program in RTI International's Behavioral Health and Criminal Justice Research Division. Among her research interests and areas of expertise are families and incarceration, HIV risk and prevention, and how health disparities relate to wealth distribution in urban populations. She is the author of Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (University of Chicago Press, 2008), an ethnographic study of the 'secondary prisonization' of women in relationships with incarcerated men. Her articles have appeared in Criminal Justice and Behavior, Ethnography, the Journal of Sex Research, Annual Review of Law & Social Science, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, PLoS ONE, and AIDS & Behavior, among others, and have been translated into three languages.
Susan Dennison is an ARC future fellow and an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University. Her research is positioned within a criminology and human development framework and focuses on the contexts affecting children's developmental systems and life outcomes, and the importance of using evidence-based research to inform policy change, prevent crime, and improve outcomes for at-risk children. Her future fellowship focuses on the impact of parental incarceration on the family system and the mechanisms that mediate developmental outcomes for incarcerated parents, their children, and caregivers.
Fiona Donson is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University College Cork. Her publications include Legal Intimidation: A SLAPP in the Face of Democracy (Free Association Books, 2000) and articles on protest, human rights, administrative justice, policing, and prisons. She has collaborated on projects funded by the British government, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the Commission for the Support of Victims of Crime. Before joining UCC at the end of 2007 she worked as a child rights advocate in Cambodia for a number of years, developing child rights training for lawyers with UNICEF and running a major child rights project funded by the European Commission. She has taught at a number of law schools in the UK including Leicester and Cardiff. Her current research includes the rights of children of incarcerated parents, the legal right for citizens to participate in democratic processes, and administrative justice.
Signe Frederiksen holds a PhD from Aarhus University. She is a researcher in the department for children and family research at the Danish National Center for Social Research (SFI). She has been involved in register- and survey-based studies on wellbeing among children and youth in out-of-home care as well as studies of the long-term outcomes for these children such as educational attainment, labour market attachment, and crime. Currently she is involved in a research project on wellbeing among children with an incarcerated parent, focusing on everyday life.
Rafaela Granja is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Minho. Her main areas of research are governability of criminality, prison studies, and family relationships. More recently she has focused on the sociological effects of science and technology, in particular on the surveillance methods used to monitor 'criminal populations' and the consolidation of links between family and criminality.
Mark Halsey is a professor and ARC future fellow at Flinders University. His areas of interest include youth offending, repeat incarceration, and desistance from crime. He has received three successive Australian Research Council grants to study these and related issues. Mark has undertaken consultancies for state and local government in areas ranging across graffiti vandalism, restorative and therapeutic justice, mentoring, and serious repeat youth offending. In 2012, he was awarded a four year Australian Research Council future fellowship for the project 'Generations through Prison: A Critical Exploration of the Causes, Experiences and Consequences of Intergenerational Incarceration'.
Marie Hutton is a Lecturer in Public Law at the University of Sussex. Her cross-disciplinary research explores the empirical realities of human rights legislation in the prison environment from a socio-legal perspective. She has a longstanding interest in the topic and has conducted extensive research with prisoners and their families in prisons in England and Northern Ireland. As part of her doctoral research, at the University of Cambridge, Marie spent 9 months in two local male category B/C prisons observing each stage of the visiting process and undertook semi-structured interviews with prisoners, their visitors, and visits staff. She recently held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Birmingham.
Cara Jardine completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explored which relationships are affected when a person is sentenced to a period of imprisonment in Scotland, and the impact of this particular form of punishment on relationships, families, and their perceptions of the criminal justice system. Her research interests include punishment, gender, reflexivity, and innovative research methods.
Else Marie Knudsen is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Trent University in Canada. Her main research interests are the criminal justice system and the sociology of punishment, with a particular focus on the experiences, impacts and policy context of parental incarceration. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (2017), an MSc in Social Policy (2006) and an MSW (2002). She worked as a social worker in Toronto for several years, first as a child protection investigator, and later engaged in policy and advocacy work with a criminal justice policy organization.
Anna Kotova is a graduate teaching and research scholar in the Law Faculty at Oriel College, University of Oxford. She is completing a DPhil in criminology, funded by the Sir Halley Stewart Trust. Her research focuses on the collateral impact of imprisonment and the many ways in which imprisonment reaches into and affects the lives of prisoners' families, social circles, and communities. It looks at the impact of long-term imprisonment on partners of male prisoners in the UK and uses qualitative methods to explore how the partners of prisoners cope with a long sentence and the associated pain and deprivation.
Caroline Lanskey is an affiliated lecturer at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Building on an earlier ESRC postdoctoral research fellowship, her work addresses the criminal justice experiences of young people and families with a particular focus on imprisonment, education, citizenship, and well-being.
Nancy Loucks is the Chief Executive of Families Outside, a Scottish voluntary organization that works on behalf of families affected by imprisonment. Prior to this she worked as an independent criminologist, specializing in prison policy and comparative criminology. She received her MPhil and PhD from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and in 2012 was appointed as visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde's Centre for Law, Crime, and Justice. Nancy has conducted extensive research into human rights issues in prison, female and young offenders, prison violence and protests, addiction, suicides and self-harm, violence-risk-assessment and management, the experience of offenders with learning difficulties and learning disabilities, homelessness amongst ex-prisoners, and the maintenance of prisoners' family ties. She has researched family issues and family participation in prisoner resettlement and studied the role of prison visitors' centres, the work of family contact officers, and the experience of young parents in prison. She has conducted consultations with prisoners' families and written reviews of the literature on the needs of prisoners' families and the services they require for international journals. Nancy was awarded an OBE in the 2016 New Year's Honours list for services to education and human rights.
Friedrich Lösel is emeritus professor at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, and was its Director until September 2012. He is also Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychology, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and was its Director until September 2011. He is a chartered forensic psychologist and a member of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has carried out research into juvenile delinquency, prisons, offender treatment, developmental prevention, football hooliganism, school bullying, personality-disordered offenders, protective factors and resilience, close relationships, child abuse, family education and programme evaluation. He has published more than 360 journal articles and book chapters and is the author or editor of more than thirty books, research reports, and special journal issues. He has recently published a research paper titled 'Risk and Protective Factors during Resettlement of Imprisoned Fathers with their Families'. In recognition of his scientific work, he has received various honours including the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement award presented by the European Association of Psychology and Law, the Sellin-Glueck Award from the American Society of Criminology, the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, and the Jerry Lee Lifetime Achievement Award given by the American Society of Criminology.
Tania Louriero is an independent researcher with a background in clinical and forensic psychology. She worked as a research associate for the Parenting and Family Support Research Programme in the Department of Psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University, where she was a project coordinator of a randomized controlled trial. Previously she worked with Families Outside as a Visiting Fellow, conducting research into the use of child/family impact assessments in court. Building on this research, Tania continued her work with Families Outside, in collaboration with the Scottish Commissioner for Children and Young People, for research into the experiences of children and young people who have had a family member sent to prison. Tania's research interests focus on imprisonment, impact on children, parenting intervention, early intervention, child maltreatment and domestic violence.
Lucy Markson recently completed her PhD in developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge. Her project looked at cumulative risks and within-family protective factors as explanatory variables of the different ways that paternal imprisonment impacts families. Her research reflects her interests in resilience, family relationships, child development, and social equality.
Shona Minson is a final year doctoral student at the University of Oxford. After graduating from St.Anne's College in Jurisprudence Shona was called to the Bar of England and Wales and practised criminal and family law from 1 King's Bench Walk, London. Her professional experience has led to her research interest in the points of intersection between family and criminal law. Shona is undertaking ESRC funded doctoral research on the impact of maternal imprisonment on children. The research explores the status of children of prisoners in English law and whether current sentencing policy protects children from 'all forms of discrimination or punishment on the basis of the status or activities of the child's parents' (Article 2 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child). Shona is part of the I-Hop Academic/ workforce development task force. I-Hop is an initiative of Barnardo's and the Department of Education to bring together resources and researchers with an active interest in the children of prisoners. Her report on 'Motherhood as Mitigation' won the John Sunley Prize 2013 and was published by The Howard League for Penal Reform in April 2014.
Helene Oldrup holds a PhD in sociology from Copenhagen University. Since 2009 she has been a researcher at SFI - Danish National Institute for Social Research. Her research explores the themes of family practices, relations and care, and processes of social exclusion, focusing on vulnerable families and children. She is project leader of the research project 'Everyday life and wellbeing amongst children of prisoners'.
Aisling Parkes is a lecturer in the faculty of law at University College Cork. Aisling's research interests lie in the areas of children's rights and family law as well as disability and the law. Her publications include articles on international children's rights including the rights of children with disabilities in journals such as the ILT and the IJFL, International Family Law as well as the contribution of a chapter to a book entitled Child Protection and Welfare Social Work: Contemporary Themes and Practice Perspectives. Her book, Children and International Human Rights Law: The Right of the Child to be Heard was published by Routledge-Cavendish in 2011. Her current research includes work on the rights of children of incarcerated parents.
Karen Souza is a research fellow at the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence (ACE!) at George Mason University. Her work informs the development of statistical models that are used to assist justice and behavioural health agencies in implementing evidence-based practice in order to reduce reoffending and improve offender outcomes. Karen is also a PhD candidate at City University London. Her research explores resilience in young people and its potential impact on their decisions to report peer violence as bystanders. Karen's other research interests include the potential protective function of families for imprisoned men, the psychology of imprisonment, and community based justice interventions.
Shenique S. Thomas is a senior policy analyst with the Council of State Governments Justice Center. Her research sits within a criminology and human development framework and includes the social consequences of mass incarceration, race and ethnicity, and restorative justice. She has conducted research about the social implications of mass imprisonment and the utility of criminogenic risk assessments for specific offender groups.
Sara Wakefield is an assistant professor at the School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University. Her research interests focus on the consequences of mass imprisonment for the family, with an emphasis on childhood wellbeing and racial inequality, and is co-author of Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality (with Christopher Wildeman). Related work examines the social networks and conditions of confinement of inmates and social/family ties during reentry.
Christopher Wildeman is Associate Professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University and a senior researcher at the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit. His work considers the prevalence, causes, and consequences of contact with the criminal justice system and the child welfare system for families. His first book, Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality (with Sara Wakefield) was published by Oxford University Press in 2013.
