PRILA Experiencing Prison Oversight: Interviews with NPMs and oversight bodies

Jamie Bennett has worked in prisons since 1996 and held a number of senior positions. He is currently Governor of HMP Grendon & Springhill.

HMP Grendon is a unique establishment, being the only prison to operate entirely as a series of therapeutic communities. The work of Grendon has an international reputation in providing effective interventions for men who have committed serious offences and have personality disorders. HMP Springhill is an innovative open prison which helps men to prepare for their release and resettle into the community.

Jamie is editor of the Prison Service Journal and has published over 100 articles and reviews covering topics including: prisons and the media, social inequality and imprisonment, and the development of managerialism. He has produced three books: Understanding Prison Staff (ed with Ben Crewe and Azrini Wahidin Willan 2008), Dictionary of Prisons and Punishment (ed with Yvonne Jewkes Willan 2008) and The Prisoner (ed with Ben Crewe Routledge 2011). He is currently completing a PhD thesis entitled: The Working Lives of Prison Managers: An Exploration of Agency and Structure in the Late Modern Prison.

Kitty Calavita is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She was President of the Law & Society Association in 2000-2001, and is a Thorsten Sellin Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She received the Law & Society Association’s Harry Kalven award in 2015. She has published widely in the fields of immigration and immigration lawmaking, and more recently on prisons and legal mobilization. An early book, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS (1992), documented the internal dynamics of the INS in shaping the Bracero Program, and connected structural contradictions in the political economy to the details of agency decision making. Another book, Invitation to Law & Society, provides an accessible overview of the burgeoning field of socio-legal studies. Her most recent book (with Valerie Jenness), Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic (2015), focuses on the grievance process in California prisons, and explores the contradictions and intersections between the logics of rights and punitive control.

Ian Cameron joined Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland (CJINI) as an Inspector in May 2009.

CJINI is an independent, statutory inspectorate established in 2003 under s.45 of the Justice (Northern Ireland) Act 2002. It is the only unified inspectorate in the United Kingdom or Ireland that can look at all the agencies that make up the criminal justice system apart from the judiciary. Organisations which CJI inspect include the police service, prison service, prosecution service, youth justice services, probation service and the courts.

Since joining CJINI, Ian has carried out a number of inspections of the three prisons in Northern Ireland, but has also undertaken a number of thematic prison inspections including Corporate Governance in the Northern Ireland Prison Service, the Management of Life and ICS Prisoners, the Safety of Prisoners held by the Northern Ireland Prison Service, and is currently engaged in an Inspection of Prisoner Resettlement.

In the wider criminal justice system he has carried out Inspections of Securing Attendance at Court, Mental Health, the Enforcement of Fines, Avoidable Delay, Domestic Violence and Abuse, Youth Offending Interventions and the Northern Ireland Courts Service Estate. Most recently his inspection work was in relation to cyber-crime and business crime.

Hugh Chetwynd grew up in South Africa and England. In April 1993, joined the Council of Europe (international organisation with 47 countries working on human rights, the rule of law and democracy, based in Strasbourg, France). From 1993-2002 he worked on criminal justice reform in Albania; abolition of the death penalty in Europe; training of legal professionals on the European Convention on Human Rights. He was Head of Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002-2005, working notably in fields of criminal justice (including prisons), human rights and education, and constitutional reform. From 2005 to present he works with the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), assessing the treatment of persons deprived of their liberty in 47 countries (notably, prisons, police stations and immigration detention but also psychiatric institutions and social care home); worked on number of thematic issues such as solitary confinement, life-sentenced prisoners, immigration detention, combatting impunity, children in detention. See www.coe.int/en/web/cpt

Valerie Jenness is a Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the politics of crime control and transformations in corrections and public policy. She is the author of four books, including, most recently, Appealing to Justice: Prisoner, Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic (with Kitty Calavita, University of California Press, 2015), and many articles published in sociology, law, and criminology journals. Her work has been honored with awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Pacific Sociological Association, the Law and Society Association, the Western Society of Criminology, University of California, and Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.

Her studies of sexual assault in prisons, the management of prisoners with mental health concerns, transgender prisoners, and the inmate appeals system in prison have informed public policy. She has served on the California Governor’s Rehabilitation Strike Team to assist with the implementation of legislation designed to provide rehabilitation services to tens of thousands of California prisoners (AB 900). More recently, she has worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, the United States Courts for the 9th circuit, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to develop and implement innovative policy.

Don Specter is the Executive Director of the Prison Law Office, California. Don joined the Prison Law Office in 1979, and became its Executive Director in 1984. Don is responsible for the administration of the office and for directing litigation aimed at improving conditions in adult and juvenile correctional facilities. He has been lead counsel in numerous impact cases and has successfully argued cases at all levels in the California and federal courts, including successfully arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata, 563 U.S. 493 (2011) (holding the court-mandated population limit for California prisons was necessary to remedy violations of prisoners’ constitutional rights to adequate medical and mental health care) and Pa. Dep’t of Corr. v. Yeskey, 524 U.S. 206 (1998) (unanimously holding the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to state prisoners). Don created and directs the US-European Criminal Justice Innovation Program which, in partnership with the Criminal Justice & Health Consortium at U.C. San Francisco, brings correctional leaders on facilitated tours of European prisons where they learn about innovative and humane approaches to sentencing, treatment and prison reform. He was a member of the Civil Justice Reform Act Advisory Committee to Northern District of California and chair of the California State Bar’s Commission on Corrections. Don earned his B.A. in Economics from New College in Sarasota, Florida in 1974 and his J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law in 1978. He was admitted to the California State Bar in November 1978.

Dirk van Zyl Smit is Professor of Comparative and International Penal Law at the University of Nottingham. From 1982 to 2005 he was Professor of Criminology at the University of Cape Town, where he was also Dean of the Faculty of Law from 1990 to 1995. In 2012 he was Global Visiting Professor at the New York University School of Law. In recent years he has also held appointments as a visiting professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, the Paul Cezanne University in Aix en Provence and the Catholic University of Leuven.

He holds BA and LLB degrees from the University of Stellenbosch and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. In 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in law by the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald in Germany. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Penal Law in Freiburg and a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow at the New York University School of Law. He is also an Advocate of the High Court of South Africa.

Niall is Manager of the 'Pathways Centre', and is involved with prison education and the education and support of prisoners post-release.

A graduate of the Trinity Access Programme at Trinity College Dublin, Niall holds a Degree in Social Science from Maynooth University, a Postgraduate Diploma in Adult and Community Education from Maynooth University, a Postgraduate Diploma in Education Management from Maynooth University and a Masters in Criminology from Dublin Institute of Technology. Niall is a founding member of the Prisoner Support Network and a member of the Irish Prison Service Research Panel.

Niall serves both on the board of directors of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) and also on the board of The Irish Association for the Social Integration of Offenders, (IASIO).