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Dr Emily Hart

Senior Lecturer

Emily is a critical criminologist who's research crosses the areas of prisons, desistance from crime and resistance movements.

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About

Emily is a critical criminologist who's research crosses the areas of prisons, desistance from crime and resistance movements.

Emily is a critical criminologist who's research crosses the areas of prisons, desistance from crime and resistance movements.

Emily's work takes an anti-carceral feminist and abolitionist stance and is concerned with the harms of imprisonment and its detrimental impact on desistance, post custody experiences and communities. Her research examines the impact of prison expansion and forms of resistance to punitive state measures and she also has an interest in feminist research methods and critical social theory.

Emily is the co-editor of the books Resist the Punitive State: Grassroots struggles across welfare, housing, education and prisons (Pluto Press) and New Perspectives on Desistance: Theoretical and empirical developments (Palgrave).

Emily took up her post at Leeds Beckett in December 2022. She has previously held lectureships at the University of Liverpool, Lancaster University and Liverpool Hope University. Emily completed her PhD at the University of Leeds (ESRC 1+3). She also holds an MSc Social Research (University of Leeds), MA Sociology (London School of Economics and Political Science), BA Sociology with Politics (London Metropolitan University). In addition she has a previous career in Secondary and Post 16 education and holds a PGCE in Social Science and Humanities from the Institute of Education, University of London.

Research interests

Emily is currently conducting research into the impact of the new wave of 'mega prisons' on local communities amid the governments program of prison expansion. She also continues to develop a 'critical desistance' approach to the analysis of post custody experiences.

Emily's work includes theorising the resistance strategies utilised by a variety of campaigns in resisting the increasingly punitive state. She is also involved in a joint project examining the the Brooke House Immigration Detention Centre Inquiry. All her research and campaigning work is underpinned by a commitment to abolitionist politics and anti-carceral feminism.

Publications (13)

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Chapter

Reflexivity in Criminological Research

Featured 2014 Reflexivity in Criminological Research Experiences with the Powerful and the Powerless Palgrave Macmillan UK
AuthorsAuthors: Hart EL, Editors: Lumsden K, Winter A
Book

New Perspectives on Desistance

Featured 2017 Hart EL, van Ginneken EFJC1-301 Palgrave Macmillan UK
AuthorsAuthors: Hart EL, van Ginneken EFJC, Editors: Hart EL, van Ginneken EFJC

This book brings together a collection of emergent research that moves the debate on desistance beyond a general consideration of individual and social structural influences. The authors examine empirical developments which have implications for policy surrounding resettlement and re-offending, but also for punishment practices. Presenting thought-provoking theoretical advances and critiques, the editors challenge and enrich traditional understandings of desistance. A wide range of chapters explore how some criminal justice interventions hinder the desistance process, but also how alternative approaches may be more helpful in promoting and supporting desistance. Thorough and diverse, this book will be of great interest to scholars of criminology and criminal justice, social policy, sociology and psychology, and of special interest to researchers and practitioners working with (ex-)offenders.

Chapter

Prisoners Post Release: The Need for a ‘Critical Desistance’

Featured 2017 New Perspectives on Desistance Palgrave Macmillan UK

Prison does not promote desistance. Statistics around reoffending following a custodial sentence demonstrate that the penal system is not effective in curtailing recidivism despite repeated government aims to reduce reoffending. Much desistance research has demonstrated that a cessation in offending is the outcome of a complex interaction between subjective/agency factors and social/environmental factors. However, desistance research has failed to engage with more radical arguments around prison abolition. This chapter therefore aims to examine this gap in the literature and advocates for scholarship and research into a ‘critical desistance’. Utilising the Real Utopias work of Erik Olin Wright (2006, 2010) as the basis for a more radical approach, this chapter suggests a framework for a critical desistance based on principles of social justice, emancipatory alternatives to punishment and engagement with wider social change. The reformist trajectory of most desistance research and criminal justice practice has led to the continued notion that prison could work under certain circumstances. A critical desistance approach is grounded in the abolition of prisons and punishment, rather than the reform of a system that serves to restrain desistance trajectories. This chapter argues that prison and penal punishment are a contributing cause of recidivism and, therefore hinder the process of desistance. Crucially, desistance research needs to engage with abolitionist theory, as the dismantling of the prison industrial complex would have the greatest desistance promoting potential of all.

Chapter

Constructing a Feminist Desistance: Resisting Responsibilization

Featured 2023 Feminist Responses to Injustices of the State and its Institutions: Politics, Intervention, Resistance Bristol University Press
AuthorsAuthors: Hart E, Barr U, Editors: Atkinson K, Barr U, Monk H, Tucker K
Chapter

Resisting the Punitive State-Corporate Nexus: Activist Strategy and the Integrative Transitional Approach

Featured 01 December 2019 Resist the Punitive State Grassroots Struggles Across Welfare, Housing, Education and Prisons
AuthorsAuthors: Hart E, Moth R, Greener J, Editors: Hart EL
Book

Resist the Punitive State Grassroots Struggles Across Welfare, Housing, Education and Prisons

Featured 20 November 2019 272 Pluto Press (UK)
AuthorsHart EL, Greener J, Moth R

What do we do when housing, mental health, disability, prisons and immigration policy become synonymous with state violence?

Journal article
‘A pre-requisite of progress’? Prison modernisation and new prison building in England and Wales
Featured 11 February 2024 Punishment & Society26(5):1-20 SAGE Publications
AuthorsJones R, Hart E, Scott D

Drawing upon archival research and documentary analysis, this article offers the first in-depth critical account of the prison modernisation narrative in England and Wales. By closely examining the claims behind the UK Government's current prison building policy, the article reveals that prison modernisation is severely undermined by a lack of supporting evidence as well as arguments which indisputably serve to contradict the government's claims. In concluding that modernisation is a seductive and elusive concept which has been deployed to legitimate and support investment in the prison estate, the article offers new and important insights that contribute to critical research agendas around the endurance, survival, and growth of the prison, despite irrefutable and overwhelming evidence of its failure. The analysis presented here should encourage and embolden academics, policy makers, practitioners and politicians in England and Wales, as well as those in jurisdictions where modernisation is also used to legitimate prison expansion, to engage more critically with the claims behind prison modernisation.

Journal article
Systemic Failings or “Isolated Incidents”? A Discourse Analysis of Corporate Blame Avoidance for the Mistreatment of Immigration Detainees
Featured 16 September 2024 Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime6(2):1-12 SAGE Publications
AuthorsSchlembach R, Hart EL

This article draws on data from a major public inquiry in the UK to examine how the multinational corporation G4S sought to avoid blame for the mistreatment of immigration detainees in its care. Our analysis is based on a critical discourse analysis of oral and written evidence given by G4S and one of the company’s managing directors to the Brook House Inquiry. We show how discursive strategies of blame avoidance were prominent features of this evidence, including the scapegoating of individual custody officers, the legitimation of the profit-seeking management of immigration detention and the de-legitimation of those who brought the mistreatment of detainees to light. The article contributes to our understanding of the discursive practices employed by powerful actors to limit corporate responsibility for systemic failings.

Chapter

Power, Pregnancy and Prison: The Impact of a Researcher’s Pregnancy on Qualitative Interviews with Women Prisoners

Featured 2014 Reflexivity in Criminological Research Palgrave Macmillan UK

This chapter explores how a researcher’s pregnancy impacted on a series of qualitative semi-structured interviews with women prisoners. I will argue that the utilising of a more general feminist approach which is sympa- thetic to the needs of women and which has the notion of reflexivity and a commitment to less exploitative research at its centre was in the case of this research preferable to adopting a full feminist standpoint. Feminist standpoint theory reflects the view that ‘women (or feminists) occupy a social location that affords them/us a privileged access to social phenom- ena’ (Longino 1993, 201). In Money, Sex and Power (1983), Nancy Hartstock claimed that it was women’s unique standpoint within the social world that provided the justification for feminists’ claims at truth. In the research on which this chapter is based, commonality was certainly found between myself and the women prisoners in terms of both our gender and our experi- ences surrounding children, pregnancy and motherhood and this enhanced the research process. There were, however, other differences that our shared gender could not overcome, for example, in terms of class, power and sta- tus that meant our experiences of the social world were poles apart. I could not therefore claim to have epistemological privilege as other inequalities between us had to be considered and the approach used here therefore, while feminist in nature, stops short of a full feminist standpoint.

Journal article
Women Prisoners and the Drive for Desistance: Capital and Responsibilization as a Barrier to Change
Featured 27 May 2017 Women and Criminal Justice27(3):151-169 Taylor and Francis Group

There is a significant and growing volume of research into the way in which offenders desist from crime and their resettlement and reentry into society following a custodial sentence. As is too often the case in criminological research, women are underrepresented in these areas of investigation. This research aimed to investigate how women in the last 3 months of a prison sentence plan and prepare for their release. Using data generated from qualitative interviews with women prisoners and prison staff over a 13-month period in a closed women’s prison in England, this paper will argue that women prisoners have motivation and desire to desist from crime post-release, but their attempts to plan for release are hindered by a responsibilization discourse that runs throughout the institution and by a severe lack in all forms of capital (social, cultural, economic, and symbolic). This not only results in many women being released with little support in place to help them achieve their aims of a crime-free life in the future but also highlights the problems with a prison system based on male-centered knowledge.

Report
Chorley ‘Super Prison’: The case against
Featured 30 November 2022 Cardiff University Cardiff Chorley 'Super Prison': The Case Against Publisher
AuthorsHart E, Jones R, Scott D

This report sets out a response to the Ministry of Justice’s Proof of Evidence submitted in June 2022. The findings presented here are based on independent research and scrutiny of official data collected as part of an ongoing research project that will offer the first in-depth analysis of the UK Government’s ‘prison modernisation’ agenda in England and Wales.

Journal article

The Wrexham Titan prison and the case against prison expansion

Featured August 2015 Critical and Radical Social Work3(2):289-294 Bristol University Press
AuthorsHart EL, Schlembach R

The building of a new ‘super prison’ in Wrexham, North Wales has begun amidst a wider expansion of the penal industrial complex. Campaigns are mobilising nationally and locally against the project. This article examines the concerns surrounding what will become the United Kingdom’s largest prison and argues that its construction is a symptom of a wider ideological attack on marginalised groups while also examining the case against prison expansion.

Journal article
Towards a criminology of public inquiries: From cautious optimism to contestation in the Brook House Inquiry
Featured 06 August 2022 Criminology and Criminal Justice25(2):1-19 (19 Pages) SAGE Publications
AuthorsSchlembach R, Hart EL

Although UK public inquiries garner huge amounts of public attention, there have been few systematic studies of their role in scrutinising and reforming criminal justice policy and practice. This is despite a growing number of inquiries, held under the Inquiries Act 2005, into critical matters relating to policing, justice and home affairs. This article explores the contested nature of statutory inquiries as mechanisms for accountability and opportunity for policy reform. We suggest that inquiries provide fertile grounds for criminological analysis, if we understand them as sites of contestation where political priorities compete over questions of procedure, scope and participation. Our focus is on the Brook House Inquiry into the mistreatment of detainees in a British immigration removal centre. The analysis shows a tension between the public-facing nature of inquiries and their legalistic processes.

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