ICPA Annual Conference 2024

Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow where he works in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. He is also the Chair of the Board of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

 

Prior to becoming an academic in 1998, Fergus worked for a decade in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker. Since then, his teaching and his many research projects and publications have examined institutions, cultures and practices of punishment, rehabilitation and reintegration. In 2021, his book ‘Pervasive Punishment: Making sense of mass supervision’ was awarded the European Society of Criminology's Book Prize.

 

Fergus’s engagement with creative methods of research over the last decade or so has also had the unanticipated effect of enabling him to become an award-winning singer-songwriter.

Dr. Best is Professor of Addiction Recovery at Leeds Trinity University, Honorary Professor of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Addiction Science at Monash University (Melbourne). He is also chair of the Prisons Research Network of the British Society of Criminology. He is also an Affiliate Senior Scientist at the Public Health Institute in California and a founding member of the College of Lived Experience Recovery Organisations in the UK.

 

Trained as a psychologist and criminologist, he has worked in practice, research and policy in the areas of addiction recovery and rehabilitation of offenders. He has authored or co-edited seven books on addiction recovery and desistance from offending, and has written more than 230 peer-reviewed journal publications and around 70 book chapters and technical reports. He is one of the leading academics in the area of addiction recovery and a key innovator in developing recovery capital measurement tools and methods.

Mark Halsey is Matthew Flinders Professor of Criminology, Research Lead, and member of the Centre for Social Impact at Flinders University. He has had a long term interest in the conditions which support desistance from crime among various offender populations and has attracted in excess of $8 million in research funding on this and related topics—including a 5-year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship on intergenerational incarceration. Mark is co-author with Simone Deegan of Young Offenders: Crime, Prison and Struggles for Desistance—a qualitative longitudinal (10-year) study that received the 2017 Christine M Alder Book Prize for having ‘made a valuable and outstanding contribution to criminology’.

 

From 2016 to 2022, Mark was Co-Chief Editor of the Journal of Criminology (formerly the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology) and currently serves on the editorial boards of Incarceration (Sage), Current Issues in Criminal Justice (Taylor & Francis) and the International Series on Desistance and Rehabilitation (Routledge). He has been a Visiting Fellow at such institutions as UC Berkeley and University of Oxford. From mid 2025, Mark will lead a $3.5 million Industry Laureate project called “Breaking the Prison-Reoffending Cycle: A Desistance From Crime Approach”. This is one of the top individual awards provided by the Australian Research Council and one of only 8 awarded nationally each year.