Current Funded Research Projects

RECEDE: Regulating Criminal Justice Detention (2022-2027)

Professor Philippa Tomczak won £1.3m in European Research Council funding to develop the first ever model of criminal justice detention regulation, which could help to tackle the current prison and detention crises in England and Wales.

The study will encompass police, court and prison detention and escorted transport between detention sites, using England and Wales as a case study.

The project, called RECEDE, aims to highlight how detention regulation could improve health and safety in the criminal justice system, benefiting detainees and society more broadly.

Despite ‘world-renowned’ detention monitoring apparatuses, the UK has seen a dramatic decline in prison safety since 2012 and its imprisonment rates are amongst the highest in Western Europe.

Indefinite preventive detention: The implementation and impact of the ULTimate PENalty in Norway (ULTPEN) (2021-2025)

Catherine Appleton, Hilde Dahl and Richard Whittington (Institute of Mental Health, Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and partner Berit Johnsen (KRUS - University College of Norwegian Correctional Service).

Deaths in Prison Worldwide (2022-2024)

Preventable prison deaths are common in every country, causing significant harms to families, prisons and societies. prisonDEATH brings together a multidisciplinary team from the University of Nottingham (Professor Philippa Tomczak) ,  University of Galway, Ireland (Dr Roisin Mulgrew) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Dr Catherine Appleton). This academic team are working in partnership with Penal Reform International and the international community, seeking to put the overlooked issue of prison deaths on the global penal reform agenda. Outputs include:

Tomczak, P., & Mulgrew, R. (2023). Making prisoner deaths visible: Towards a new epistemological approach. Incarceration, 4.

Improving prisoner death statistics Policy Brief – October 2024

SAFESOC: Prison Regulation for Safer Societies (2020-2024)

Professor Philippa Tomczak was awarded a £1.1 million grant through the prestigious UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowship programme to further her work into prison regulation for safer prisons and societies.

Over an initial four years, the fellowship supported Professor Tomczak, a Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nottingham, to reconceptualise prison regulation by including a broader range of representatives from multiple sectors – operating across stakeholder groups, from local to global scales.

SAFESOC

Life Imprisonment Worldwide Revisited (2019-2021)

Dr Catherine Appleton was awarded a two-year research grant from the University of Nottingham Research Fellowship scheme to revise and update the global study on life imprisonment she has worked on with Emeritus Professor Dirk van Zyl Smit, published in 2019.

This research project, supported by Nottingham's Human Rights Law Centre, brings together an interdisciplinary team to examine life imprisonment on a global scale.