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Jewniversity: Alison Liebling

Most of us are distrusting of prisoners. This month Jewniversity Corner looks at one expert who thinks that all needs to change.

August 24, 2018 09:29
Alison Liebling
2 min read

Who are the most untrustworthy and dishonest people in society? Estate agents? Tabloid hacks? The people who compiled the train schedule for Southern Rail?

What about prisoners? Surely, it would be crazy to trust them.

But that is precisely what Alison Liebling suggests we should do. And she should know. She’s been in and out of prison for three decades now. Not as a serial recidivist, but as a Cambridge University criminologist. Her current title is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Prisons Research Centre.

Her epiphany about the importance of trust came in Whitemoor prison in Cambridge. She had researched this prison in the late 1990s. A decade on, the Ministry of Justice asked her to return following a serious collapse in relations between staff and prisoners. Liebling described how the prison had become “paralysed by distrust”. Rereading her original report she noted something she had missed at the time how often she had described the guarded forms of trust that had previously existed.