23 Yvonne Jewkes: Beautiful prisons, utopian goals, researcher masochism

Yvonne Jewkes is a professor of criminology at the University of Bath in the UK. She is one of the founding editors of the of the two academic journals Crime, Media, Culture and Incarceration and she’s the series co-editor of the book series Palgrave studies in prisons and penology.

Yvonne’s main research interests are prison architecture, design and technology and how they can assist in improving quality of life and wellbeing in prison, reducing trauma, improving prisoner-staff relations, and, ultimately, in rehabilitating offenders.

In addition to all her empirical research, she has been part of several prison planning and design processes as a consultant. She is well aware of the dilemmas inherent in being a prison researcher who also participates actively in the building of new prisons, and in this episode, I ask her why she continues to take on these projects that inevitably put her an ethical tightrope.

University of Bath web page: Yvonne Jewkes — the University of Bath's research portal

Yvonne's prison architecture and design web page: Prison Architecture and Design – Yvonne Jewkes, Professor of Criminology, University of Bath (prisonarchitecturedesign.com)

Interviewer, editor and everything else: Thomas Ugelvik

Music: Morten Qvenild/Uglalyd