Professor of Penology and Criminal Justice and Deputy Director of the Prisons Research Centre

Ben Crewe is Professor of Penology and Criminal Justice, and Deputy Director of the Prisons Research Centre, at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. From 2011–2024, he was director of the Institute’s part-time course in Applied Criminology, Penology and Management. In recent years, he has led major research projects about prisoners serving life sentences from an early age and about prisoner experiences in England and Wales compared to Norway.

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Emeritus Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Professor (Emerita) Loraine Gelsthorpe (PhD, FHEA, FRSA, FAcSS) was deputy Director of the Institute between 2012–2017, and then Director from October 2017–2022. She was Director of the ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership across the social sciences in the University between 2013–2022. Loraine became emerita at the end of 2022 but continues to do research (especially on women and criminal justice and community penalties), teach and supervise. She became Chair of the Probation Institute in April 2023 — and is currently involved in the UKRI REF Pilot for People, Culture and Community, as well as continuing to sit on various government advisory committees. She is also a psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist (UKCP registered and accredited) and has run a small private practice since 2003. In 2021 Loraine was awarded the European Society of Criminology Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to European Criminology, and in 2023 the British Society of Criminology Outstanding Achievement Award.

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Director of the Institute of Criminology, Wolfson Professor of Criminology and Director of Violence Research Centre

Manuel Eisner is the Wolfson Professor of Criminology and the Director of the Institute of Criminology. He is a historian and sociologist by training and joined the Institute of Criminology in 2000. His research revolves around the role of violence and its control in the development of human societies, and in the development of humans over the life course. He has conducted research on the history of homicide since the Middle Ages, and how violence is shaped by structures of power, state control, and the ways in which the self is defined by cultural forces. He is also one of the principal investigators of the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood, a 20-year longitudinal study from ages 7 to 26.

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