Welcome Blog
Welcome to the COMPEN Blog
Welcome to the website for the COMPEN research programme, a five-year project funded by the European Research Council, whose full title is: ‘Penal policymaking and the prisoner experience: a comparative analysis’.
Julie Laursen Blog 1
The case of the missing keys
We are currently doing large amounts of fieldwork in prisons in England & Wales and in Norway and we carry keys in all prisons - a privilege and a source of quite a lot of anxiety for me. In England & Wales, we sit through long key-talks, demonstrate our ability to securely open and lock gates in front of staff, and are thoroughly advised on how to carry the keys.
Alice Ievins Blog 1
Tropes
For those of us who spend a lot of time in prison, there will be certain phrases which are so familiar that we almost stop listening to them. ‘In here, the best way to do your time is to keep your head down.’ ‘The officers are only like that because they were bullied at school.’ ‘The best thing about this job is the camaraderie.’ ‘I treat them with respect, and they treat me with respect.’
Anna Schliehe Blog 1
Carceral mobility
Carceral mobility and analysis of what this means for individual prisoners is a topic that I have long been interested in from both a geographical and sociological point of view. Doing most of my fieldwork in England & Wales, prison mobilities have mostly carried connotations of restrictive regimes, questioning small-scale movements and possible agency within that.
Ben Crewe Blog 1
Condiments and comparisons
Many prisons in Norway have communal dining areas, in a way that relatively few prisons do in England & Wales. We were in one of these dining areas recently, in Bjørgvin prison, on the West coast of Norway, giving out surveys to a small group of prisoners.
Kristian Mjåland Blog 1
The sound of prison
In this research project, we are comparing imprisonment in a country I know well, Norway, and countries I know less well, England & Wales. To explore the same issues in both familiar and unfamiliar contexts is one of the many advantages of comparative research like this: the unfamiliarity makes you reflect on aspects that you otherwise would have taken for granted, or simply not recognized.
Anna Schliehe Blog 2
Missing people and the pains of entry in the UK
When researching entry into and release from custody in prisons in England over the last 10 months, one aspect of entry into custody surfaced in many interviews, and that is how people in police custody become 'missing people'.
Anna Eriksson Blog
Designing dangerousness: Interviewing prisoners in Norway and Australia
I am sitting on the couch, my back to the window and the coffee table between me and the person I am interviewing. He’s sitting opposite me on a chair, his back to the door and effectively blocking the exit. I am sipping a cup of black coffee, the fourth for the day, kindly prepared and given to me by the interviewee. This is Ila prison, a high security prison in Norway that houses some of the most dangerous prisoners in the country.
Julie Laursen Blog 2
When your next of kin is a professional
The entry/exit/post-release sub-study is quite ambitious because we try to interview the same people upon their entry into custody, again just before their release from prison (which are often not the same as they entered) and then post-release from prisons in England & Wales and Norway. This blog post is about interviewees’ contact information and what this tells us about their levels of deprivation prior to, during and after imprisonment.
Alice Ievins Blog 2
SOTP: The view from the inside
In June 2017, the Ministry of Justice published an evaluation of the Core Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP), the main accredited programme provided in English and Welsh prisons for the treatment of men convicted of sex offences. [1] The report – which featured heavily in the Daily Mail and was one of the leading stories on BBC News – found that the programme did not reduce reoffending among sex offenders, and may in fact have increased it.
ESC Conference in Cardiff
Preliminary findings: The research team present papers at this week's ESC Conference in Cardiff
For almost a year, we have been busy doing fieldwork in prisons all over England & Wales and Norway. This week, however, we grant ourselves a pause from fieldwork, and head to the ESC conference in Cardiff to present preliminary findings from our research so far.
Guest Blog by Thomas Ugelvik
Distance from freedom, distance from life
Thomas Ugelvik – University of Oslo, Norway
All prisoners at Kongsvinger are supposed to be either transferred to prisons in their home countries to serve out some proportion of their sentence there, or rearrested at the end of their sentence and deported back to their countries of origin by Norwegian immigration police. Several of the prisoners I had already talked with resisted deportation as best they could.
Ben Crewe Blog 2
Gardening, growth and deep-end confinement
In my book, The Prisoner Society, I noted that the prison ‘was a place of mirth and warmth as well as misery’ (2009: 334). In a number of other publications, I have tried to highlight practices and pockets in prisons that enable forms of hope and humanity. These shards of sunlight can be found even at the terminus of the prison system.
Guest Blog by Keir Irwin-Rogers
Role conflict in Approved Premises and post-prison supervision
In 2013, I spent a period of six months visiting three APs, conducting periods of observation and interviewing residents and members of hostel staff. The research generated a number of interesting findings, one of which concerns a fundamental role conflict that threatens to severely undermine the legitimacy of APs and post-release supervision, particularly in light of current resource pressures.
Saying no by Kristian Mjåland
Saying no
In a much-cited article, Mary Bosworth (2005), together with four of her research participants, asked why prisoners volunteer to be interviewed by researchers. They argue that wanting to help the researcher, being heard, making good, and correcting wrongs are some of the important aspects that motivate prisoners to take part in prison research. These motivations resonate very well with our own experience from interviewing prisoners in England & Wales and Norway.
The Comparative Penology Group is led by Dr Ben Crewe and his research team who, since 2016, have been working on a five-year project titled: 'Penal policymaking and the prisoner experience: a comparative analysis'.