Midlands
Learning Together in Leicester
De Montfort University, Leicester, organised a two-day Learning Together event in partnership with HMP Leicester. The event brought together people from prisons and universities to share information about the ways we have been working together to improve the educational experiences available to people in prison.
Day 1 – 15 June 2017 – HMP Leicester – Developing Learning Together partnerships. Arrival: arrive to enter prison for midday.
Focus: What do the different prison-university partnerships look like, how did they get started, what have been the main fears and challenges? How have they been overcome?
Day 2 – 16 June – De Montfort University, Leicester (Hugh Aston building).
Focus: Making sense of Learning Together. Understanding impact. Exploring our pedagogy and our methods.
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Rethinking Prisons Research
13 & 14 June 2017
A two-day conference focusing on the emerging theoretical, conceptual and empirical themes in prisons research and possible future directions.
Plenary speakers included:
Dr Jamie Bennett (HMPPS)
Dr Ben Crewe (University of Cambridge)
Dr Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham)
Dr Ruth Mann (HMPPS)
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Why Criminology needs Autoethnography : the importance of using past experiences to highlight current practices
Anita de Klerk third year PhD candidate at the University of Salford.
Anita’s PhD is entitled: The Transforming Rehabilitation Revolution: an autoethnographic investigation in voluntarism within criminal justice in England.
My focus is on the volunteer mentor and not just the peer mentor per se. In fact, my focus is on the increasing significance of voluntarism within criminal justice overall. My research is a comparative study between two case studies; the ‘old’ style volunteer mentor (before TR) and the ‘new’ style (after TR) investigating the influence that TR ,as policy, has had on the nature of voluntarism. The first case study has been constructed into a Weberian Ideal Type, completely from memory, as a Reflective Autoethnography and the second case study will be conducted as a Participatory Autoethnography where I go out and become a volunteer again and experience volunteering myself so that I may draw the comparisons.
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1 March 2017
Dr Irene Zempi, Director of the Nottingham Centre for Bias, Prejudice & Hate Crime/Lecturer in Criminology, Nottingham Trent University (email: irene.zempi@ntu.ac.uk)
Title: “I FEEL DEMOTIVATED, I DIDN’T JOIN THE FORCE FOR THIS”: The Experiences of Police Officers as Victims of Hate Crime
Abstract
Hate crime has attracted significant academic and policy interest in recent years. This has focussed, inter alia, on contested definitions and boundaries of hate crime, the difficulties of recording and measurement, and policy and operational responses. While policing has figured in these debates, this has mainly focussed on their role in responding to hate crimes, and the levels of service provided to victims. However, in light of an increasingly diverse force, minority police officers might experience hate crime because of the intersectionality between their occupation identity and ‘difference’ based on core aspects of their personal identity. Nevertheless, the experiences of police officers as victims of hate crime remain ‘invisible’ in research terms. Drawing from qualitative data elicited through a UK-based study, Dr Rob Mawby and I conducted the first ever study to examine police officers’ hate crime experiences both ‘externally’ (e.g. from members of the public) and ‘internally’ within the force (e.g. from work colleagues and supervisors). Drawing on the ‘dirty work’ literature in parallel with the hate crime framework, this paper considers how police officers make sense of, and respond to these experiences. The findings show that hate crime from within the organisation ‘hurts more’ than experiencing hate crime externally.
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2015-16 Seminar series
The third event of the series was hosted at University of Lincoln entitled Future Directions in Green Criminology.
Matthew Hall (University of Lincoln) – Environmental Mediation; Gary Potter (Lancaster University) – Mainstreaming Green Criminology ; Nigel South (University of Essex) – Subject TBC; Dominic Wood (Canterbury Christ Church University) – Environmental Justice
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The second event of the season took place at Derby University: https://www.derby.ac.uk/lhss/news-and-events/events/bsc-midlands-network-event/
On the 4th December just over 80 people attended the BSC Midlands region held at the International Policing and Justice Institute at the University of Derby. The seminar focused on police leadership with the first speaker, Dr. Mark Kilgowan, a Senior Fellow at the University of Derby, offering an insight to key challenges facing the police. During his talk Mark drew upon his experiences gathered both while serving as a police officer and during his time as Academic Director at Bramshill Police College Mark was followed by the Steve Allen, the Deputy Chief Constable of Police Scotland, who initially spoke abut how three or four key moments in his policing career had shaped his values in policing. He then offered an insight into the challenges facing Scottish policing and finished by discussing how the SNP’s public sector competence agenda linked with police accountability. The final speaker was Mike Barton, the Chief Constable of Durham, who is often described as a ‘policing maverick”. Mike did not disappoint and called for policing’s role within the criminal justice system to be reconsidered. Mike advocated a system much more orientated towards restorative justice and questioned the value short prison sentences. He finished by offering examples of policing innovation within his force and how the 14 HMIC Inspections his force endured in 2014, resulted in Durham being declared the best performing force in the country. After a brief Q&A, attendees were invited to a networking supper and discussions went on well into the night.
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Guilt and Criminal Justice: (Re)Opening the Dialogue
Great start to the BSC Midlands Regional Network: Guilt and Criminal Justice: (Re)Opening the Dialogue: Social Sciences, University of Warwick
This seminar discussed how an understanding of guilt, as a concept and as an emotion, can shed light upon contemporary problems facing criminal justice systems.
Although there has been extensive work done on guilt within other disciplines, such as philosophy, sociology and psychology, this concept has not figured very prominently in criminological debates in the UK. Meanwhile, while the idea of guilt, as a moral category, is sometimes present in legal academic debate, much less attention has been given to the psychosocial and political dimensions of the term. This seminar explored the extent the notion of guilt can assist an understanding of the authoritarian, punitive and preventive elements of contemporary criminal justice.
Speaker programme
Dr Samantha Ashenden (Department of Politics, Birkbeck, University of London)
Dr Leonidas Cheliotis (Department of Social Policy, LSE)