Penal voluntary and nonprofit sector

I aim to contribute to the emerging body of literature on the place of nonprofit, charity, nongovernmental or third-sector organizations in the criminal justice/reentry sector. My research applies desistance theory to novel criminal justice interventions, in order to question whether specific programs, facilities, approaches or philosophies can be distance-promoting. I am particularly interested in the concept of “assisted desistance,” which examines the formal and informal interventions that can help justice-involved people develop the skills and resources facilitating social inclusion.

My Masters dissertation at the University of Cambridge focuses on the penal voluntary sector in my home country, France. I worked with Auxilia, a nonprofit organization providing free distance learning to prisoners, to study volunteers’ perceptions of their relationships with their incarcerated students. I conducted 18 in-depth interviews with volunteers at Auxilia, a French prison-based distance learning organisation. The resulting dissertation, supervised by Dr Alison Liebling, was awarded a distinction, and a paper based on this dataset is currently under review at the European Journal of Criminology.