***CANCELLED*** Do prisons make people angry, alienated and dangerous? Some reflections on findings and frustrations from cumulative empirical research

Prisons can damage character, or the civic disposition, under some conditions, or they can help to foster ‘ethical self development’ on the other. The latter is rare, however, and increasingly unlikely, given deteriorating prison conditions and the need among human beings to be treated decently. What do the findings from a cumulative series of research projects on the moral qualities and effects of prison environments tell us about prisons, penal policy, and the human condition? About ‘the production of risk’? Or about doing prisons research? The study which set me off on my long prisons research career was completely qualitative, or ethnographic. Appreciative inquiry and ‘intelligent intuition’ have been critical in the slow journey towards measurement and understanding of the prison environment. Combining these techniques has ‘worked’: I think we know enough. At what point can we claim ‘expertise’, and in what respects? What do we do with our understanding? In this seminar I will try to fuse ‘findings’ with ‘grapplings’, sketching out some conclusions to date and some plans for the future.

Alison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge and the Director of the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre. She has carried out research on prison suicide, conceptualizing and measuring the moral quality of prison life, the management of difficult prisoners, incentives and earned privileges, staff-prisoner relationships, values, practices and outcomes in public and private sector corrections, the changing nature of relationships in high security prisons and the changing role of trust and forms of order in prison. She was awarded an ESRC-funded ‘Transforming Social Science’ grant in 2012-14 and was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018. Her books include Prisons and their Moral Performance: A Study of Values, Quality and Prison Life (2004, with Helen Arnold), The Effects of Imprisonment (2005, with Shadd Maruna), The Prison Officer (2nd edition 2011, with David Price and Guy Shefer) and Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: International Explorations (2013, with Justice Tankebe). She has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2020-22) to carry out the project, ‘Moral rules, social science and forms of order in prison’.