In England and Wales we have finished working on all four sub-studies which involved fieldwork in many different prisons and in the community. We began fieldwork in HMP Pentonville in autumn 2016 and have since visited and worked in over 20 prisons around the country.
The prisons we spend most time in have been very accommodating in allowing us to conduct long interviews, run surveys and do participant and spatial observation. For the Entry/Exit sub-study, for example, we spend several evenings in reception observing people coming into prison and following them until they reach their cell in order to understand what the entry process is like.
In England and Wales we have conducted well over 200 interviews in the different sub-studies and collected over 700 surveys to better understand prison conditions and individual experiences of imprisonment.
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'.
