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.
