Research team

CHIEF INVESTIGATORS

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE

PHD CANDIDATES

Maggie Hall (UNSW)
The Relationship between Sentencing, Risk and Rehabiliation: Serious Offenders and Barriers to Redemption

Aims to explore the relationship between the aims and practice of sentencing and the subsequent experience of imprisonment as it relates to these aims, in particular strategies involving actuarial risk assessment and access to rehabilitative programs. In order to explore the various subjective meanings around the aims and practice of sentencing, interviews will be conducted with prisoners, legal officers and judges.

Diana Johns (University of Melbourne)
Thesis: Getting Out, Fitting In, Getting On - The Culture of Prison Release : Post-Release Theory, Practice and Lived Experience.

This study takes a qualitative approach to understanding prisoners' release into the community. It aims to contrast the theory and practice of post-release support with the actual experience of being released from prison. Using textual analysis of policy and other documentary material, and interviews and focus groups with ex-prisoners and post-release support workers, the study seeks to explore the different ways in which prison release is experienced and understood, and how these understandings relate to each other. In this way it hopes to shed light on the everyday perils and possibilities, hopes and expectations associated with release from prison, and how these relate - for many - to the cycle of reimprisonment.

RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

  • Fiona Allison 
  • Maarten Boender
  • Diane Heckenberg
  • Peta MacGillivray
  • Vivian Mercadal
  • Michael Salter 
  • Bridgette Skehan
  • Mindy Sotiri
  • Jono Stephens 
  • Boris Waldman
  • Alisa Wicks 
  • Courtney Young