Building on Positive Convictions

My proposal focuses on the perspectives of men who have been imprisoned and gone on to become criminologists. It challenges conventional disciplinary boundaries and is both radical and innovative in foregrounding the perspectives of the small number of academics who can combine first hand experiences of imprisonment with theorisation of crime and punishment convict criminologists. It asks whether these unusual combinations of prison experience and criminology can tell us something new about the role of imprisonment in society, the lives of prisoners (and academics), the experience of imprisonment and the prospects of rehabilitation. Historically, as criminology has grown, police officers, probation staff, social workers and prison officers have contributed positively to the discipline, and benefited from studying it.