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.

People from these professional backgrounds have successfully made the transition to careers in criminology, but recently something else has happened; ex-convicts are making the journey into criminology. How does an ex-convict study crime and punishment and make sense of their personal experience? What research questions does an ex-convict have about prisons, punishment and rehabilitation? How do they teach criminology differently?  Do they research prison and prisoners differently? Ethnographic pioneer Bronislaw Malinowski sums up the epistemological thesis of the proposal: In order to explain a cultural product it is necessary to know it. And to know it, in matters of thought and emotion, is to have experienced it.

Imprisonment is much studied by criminologists, but rarely experienced directly. This research changes that.