📣In September 2025 our partners Tasha and Kemi from Reformed Development will launch a new empowerment programme. The Mindset Programme is aimed at women with convictions. It will run for 12 weeks from 3rd September and focus on:
✨️Employability.
✨️Goal Setting.
✨️Increased self-belief and confidence.
To register your interest, visit: https://www.reformed16.com/mindset
Image: Paula Harriott with the Prisoner Leaders book.
In September 2025, team members attended the European Society of Criminology conference in Athens, Greece.
Gill Buck, along with Professor Ben Crewe from the University of Cambridge, were invited to an ‘Author meets Critic’ session. They responded to the excellent book ‘Prisoner Leaders‘, by Paula Harriott and her colleague Marion Vannier, frrom the University of Manchester.
The book examines prisoner leadership, including its qualities, conditions, and potentials, through co-authored chapters by academics and those with lived experience. In doing so it challenges assumptions about leadership while addressing themes such as gender, race, drugs, violence, work, and faith.
Critics praised the book for centering the voices of hidden prisoner leaders, highlighting their skills, resilience, and contributions to prison communities, while also noting its impact in policy spaces, including the UK parliament. They also raised questions about transparency in collaborations and deeper engagement with prisoner writings and historical traditions of prisoner-led reform.
The session proved a useful forum to critically reflect on a text closely aligned with our own research aims, and to share some of our own emerging findings on the history of prisoner activism.
Image: Gill Buck and Paula Harriott in Athens.
Women in prison have key insights into problems and solutions related to imprisonment but their voices are often peripheral, or they are constructed as ‘pathetic’.
There is unrealised potential for prison regulators to network women in prison and families with other regulators (e.g., voluntary sector) to deepen understanding of problems for broader social benefit.
Prison regulators across scales hold potential to illuminate harms of imprisonment and influence alternatives, yet criminologists rarely engage with these mechanisms.
Dr Gill Buck and Philippa Tomczak analyse prisoners’ participatory roles in the ‘transformative’ Corston Report (2007) and The Corston Report 10 Years On, using actor-network-theory to guide document analysis. They reflect on Corston’s calls for a radically different, woman-centred approach to criminal justice.
A new paper co-authored by Dr Gill Buck and Dr Philippa Tomczak explores Suicide in prison: The potentials and pitfalls of film-research collaborations.
When somebody dies in prison, grief may not be openly acknowledged. Trauma can be embodied, difficult to express in words.
Collaborative film can centre and validate lived experiences, emotionally engage people, influence understanding, and potentially instigate social change.
BUT, we also need to pay attention to (potential) harms, including the safety of people involved, the potential for emotional pain, and the possibility that nothing might change.
One constructive proposal is wellbeing plans for all collaborators including reflective supervision for researchers.
If harms are considered and collaboratively addressed, co-produced film offers a valuable tool for research dissemination, engaging audiences in new ways and potentially influencing more humane responses to entrenched social problems.
☎️If you or loved ones are experiencing suicidal thoughts call Samaritans 24/7 on 116 123.
