The concept of a carceral archipelago was first used by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 publication, Surveiller et Punir, to describe the modern penal system of the 1970s, embodied by the well-known penal institution at Mettray in France. The phrase combines the adjective "carceral", which means that which is related to jail or prison, with archipelago—a group of islands. Foucault referred to the "island" units of the "archipelago" as a metaphor for the mechanisms, technologies, knowledge systems and networks related to a carceral continuum. The 1973 English publication of the book by Solzhenitsyn called The Gulag Archipelago referred to the forced labor camps and prisons that composed the sprawling carceral network of the Soviet Gulag.
The Institute of Criminology is the criminological research institute within the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. The Institute is one of the oldest criminological research institutes in Europe, and has exerted a strong influence on the development of criminology. Its multidisciplinary teaching and research staff are recruited from the disciplines of law, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology. It is located on the Sidgwick Site in the west of Cambridge, England. The Institute of Criminology building was designed by Allies and Morrison. The Institute is also home to the Radzinowicz Library, which houses the most comprehensive criminology collection in the United Kingdom. The Institute has approximately 50 PhD students, 30-40 M.Phil. students, and 200 M.St students. The Institute also offers courses to Cambridge undergraduates, particularly in law, but also in human social and political sciences and in psychology and behavioural sciences.
Stuart Henry is professor emeritus, Criminal justice and former director of the School of Public Affairs, San Diego State University (2006–17). He has also been visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent's School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research from 2008 to 2013 and visiting research scholar in sociology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, 2017.
James Barrett Jacobs was the Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts at New York University School of Law, where he was a faculty member since 1982. He was a specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice.
Jock Young was a British sociologist and an influential criminologist.
Jonathan Simon is an American academic, the Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law, and the former Associate Dean of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Simon’s scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies, risk and the law, and the history of the interdisciplinary study of law. His other interests include criminology; penology; sociology; insurance models of governing risk; governance; the origins and consequences of, and solutions to, the California prison "crisis"; parole; prisons; capital punishment; immigration detention; and the warehousing of incarcerated people.
Nikolas Rose is a British sociologist and social theorist. He is Distinguished Honorary Professor at the Research School of Social Sciences, in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University and Honorary Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. From January 2012 to until his retirement in April 2021 he was Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London, having joined King's to found this new Department. He was the Co-Founder and Co-Director of King's ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health. Before moving to King's College London, he was the James Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, director and founder of LSE's BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society from 2002 to 2011, and Head of the LSE Department of Sociology (2002–2006). He was previously Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Head of the Department of Sociology, Pro-Warden for Research and Head of the Goldsmiths Centre for Urban and Community Research and Director of a major evaluation of urban regeneration in South East London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex, England, and Aarhus University, Denmark.
David Downes is a British sociologist and criminologist and is Professor Emeritus of Social Administration at the London School of Economics.
Johan Thorsten Sellin was a Swedish American sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a penologist and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology.
Sir Anthony Edward Bottoms FBA is a British criminologist. He is life fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, having previously been a Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminology in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 2006 and until December 2007 a professor of criminology jointly at the universities of Cambridge and Sheffield.
Vincenzo Ruggiero was an Italian-born sociologist who was Professor of Sociology at Middlesex University, London. He was also director of the Centre for Social and Criminological Research at Middlesex University. He died in London on 3 February 2024, at the age of 73. He is survived by his partner of 33 years, Cynthia, and daughter, Lucia.
Punishment and Social Structure (1939), a book written by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, is the seminal Marxian analysis of punishment as a social institution. It represents the "most sustained and comprehensive account of punishment to have emerged from within the Marxist tradition" and "succeeds in opening up a whole vista of understanding which simply did not exist before it was written". It is a central text in radical criminology and an influential work in criminological conflict theory, cited as a foundation text in several major textbooks. It offers a broader (macrosociological) level of analysis than many micro-analyses that focus on the atomized and differentiated individual.
Philip Thomas Bean is Emeritus professor of Criminology at Loughborough University, former President of the British Society of Criminology (1996–99) and an authority and author on the impact on society of drugs, mental illness and crime having published 62 works that are held in approximately 6,000 libraries around the world.
Valerie Jenness is an author, researcher, public policy advisor, and professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Jenness is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and prior to that, was a senior visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. Jenness served as dean of the School of Social Ecology from 2009 to 2015 and chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society from 2001-2006. Jenness is credited with conducting the first systemic study of transgender women in men's prisons.
Nicola Mary Lacey, is a British legal scholar who specialises in criminal law. Her research interests include criminal justice, criminal responsibility, and the political economy of punishment. Since 2013, she has been Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE). She was previously Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at LSE (1998–2010), and then Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (2010–2013).
Valeria Vegh Weis is an Argentinean-German Author. She specializes in criminology, criminal law, international criminal law and transitional justice. Vegh Weis is a Research Fellow at Konstanz Universität Zukunftskolleg, where she focuses on the role of victims organizations to confront state crimes. She is also an adjunct professor at Buenos Aires University and Quilmes National University. She is the Vice President of the Instituto Latinoamericano de Criminología y Desarrollo Social. Vegh Weis won several awards, including the Critical Criminology of the Year Award by the American Society of Criminology.
Frances Mary Heidensohn is an academic sociologist and criminologist at the London School of Economics, who is acknowledged as a pioneer in feminist criminology. Her 1968 article The Deviance of Women: A Critique and An Enquiry was the first critique of conventional criminology from a feminist perspective.
Lesley McAra is Chair of Penology at the University of Edinburgh She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was appointed a CBE in the New Year's Honours List 2018, for services to Criminology.
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an American writer, sociologist, criminologist and social worker. He teaches at the University of Chicago in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation.
Victor Bailey is a British social and legal historian, author, editor and academic. Bailey is the Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kansas' Department of History since 2007, and the director of its Joyce & Elizabeth Hall Center for the Humanities for seventeen years from 2000 to 2017. He is credited with editing and authoring some of the best volumes in nineteenth century British history, criminal law, policing, and punishment. His work "Nineteenth-Century Crime and Punishment" is divided into four volumes. Edited by Bailey with separate extensive explanatory notes, and published by Routledge in 2021, the four volumes are more than 1500 pages long in which Bailey covers almost everything about crime and punishment from 1776 to 1914. In his review of the four volumes, Simon Devereaux described Bailey as "a scholar who, with Martin Wiener, stands preeminent amongst historians of crime, society, and punishment in modern England." Bailey was awarded the Walter D. Love Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies (1998), the W. T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Marquis Who's Who's Lifetime Achievement Award.
