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Elaine Player is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice. She joined the Dickson Poon School of Law in 1990 and was formerly a Research Fellow at the Centre for Criminological Research, University of Oxford. She is a visiting lecturer at the University of Hong Kong and a member of the editorial board of the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and the international associate editorial board of Punishment and Society.

Elaine’s research interests are principally focused on sentencing and penology. Her current project is concerned with the treatment of women in the criminal justice system, exploring the ways in which the legal processes of bail, sentencing and imprisonment operate differently for men and women. She has published three monographs on prison research: Drug Treatment in Prison, Waterside (2000); Grendon: A Study of a Therapeutic Prison, OUP (1995); Race Relations in Prisons (1989), OUP and edited one collection of essays Prisons After Woolf: Reform Through Riot (1994), Routledge. She has worked as a consultant on the development of the therapeutic prison at HMP Dovegate and was a member of the Prison Reform Trust’s Commission of Inquiry into Women’s Imprisonment and co-author of the resulting Wedderburn Report.

PhD students & topics

• Katherine Grainger, PhD: 'An examination of the tensions which arise for the criminal law in dealing with the mentally abnormal offender, with particular reference to psychopathy'.
• Sharon Jowitt, PhD: 'Juvenile Offenders and Long Term Detention'.

• 'Women in the criminal justice system: the triumph of inertia', Criminology and Criminal Justice (2013)
• 'Rehabilitation, risk management and prisoners’ rights', Criminology and Criminal Justice (2013)
• 'Sentencing Women: Towards Gender Equality', in Zedner, L. & Roberts, J. V. (eds) Principles and Values in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice: Essays in Honour of Andrew Ashworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
• 'Therapy in Prison: Revisiting Grendon 20 Years On', Howard Journal Of Criminal Justice (2010), 49 (5) 431-450 (with Elaine Genders)
• 'Criminal Justice Act 2003: The Sentencing Provisions’ co-author A. Ashworth Modern Law Review Sept (2005)
• ‘The Reduction of Women’s Imprisonment in England and Wales: Will the Reform of Short Sentences Help? Punishment and Society October (2005)
• ‘Results of Evaluations of the RAPt Drug Treatment Programme’ co-authors Liriano S. & Martin C. in M. Ramsay (ed) Prisoners’ Drug Use and Treatment: 7 Research Studies Home Office Research Studies 267 (2003)
• ‘Grendon: A Therapeutic Community in Prison’ in J. Lees, N. Manning, D. Menzies & N. Morant (eds) A Culture of Enquiry: Research Evidence and the Therapeutic Community Jessica Kingsley (2003)

View full list of Professor Player’s publications.

Undergraduate

•  Criminology & Criminal Justice