This presentation argues that the next quantum leap in prison safety, rehabilitation, and legitimacy will come not from ever‑finer actuarial dashboards but from systematically embedding lived experience expertise into everyday custodial practice. Drawing on the forthcoming Routledge volume "Beyond Autoethnography: Lived‑Experience Criminology," we advance three propositions.
First, lived experience is an operational analytic: when survivors of imprisonment co‑design risk assessments, programme curricula, and post‑release planning tools, they expose blind‑spots invisible to incident logs and KPIs, producing measurable reductions in violence and self‑harm. Second, genuine collaboration requires a new custodial allyship—shared authorship of policy papers, parity pay for peer advisors, and security protocols that acknowledge (rather than penalise) criminal records. Case studies from an English protection unit and a trauma‑responsive Colorado halfway house show how such co‑production elevates staff–resident trust. Third, ethical safeguards are pivotal: flexible timelines, pseudonymity options, and on‑call counselling prevent the re‑exploitation of system‑impacted contributors while satisfying research‑governance and occupational‑health mandates.
We close with a concrete toolkit designed for governors, clinicians, and frontline officers who must deliver humane and therapeutic custody under fiscal constraint and public scrutiny. In this frame, lived‑experience knowledge is not a progressive indulgence; it is a cost‑effective, evidence‑based lever for safer, more legitimate regimes. Operationalising it is therefore both strategically astute and morally imperative.
Moderated by Michelle Carpentier
×
Dwayne Antojado
Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology, Adelaide University, Australia
Dwayne Antojado is a Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at Adelaide University and a Visiting Scholar in the School of Government, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. Grounded in his own experience with Australia’s criminal legal system, his scholarship contributes to the emergent field of lived experience criminology by interrogating how lived experience knowledges unsettle orthodox criminological paradigms and foster epistemic justice. His current work examines the methodological, policy, and normative implications of incorporating lived experience expertise into criminal justice research, professional practice, and institutional policy. In parallel, his work offers a critical appraisal of the ways ‘lived experience’ can be appropriated, commodified, or collapsed into discourses within criminology without meaningfully and radically disrupting entrenched hierarchies of expertise. Collectively, his research seeks to reimagine the production of criminological and penological knowledge through the perspectives who have themselves been criminalised.
×
Shilaneh Sharify
PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne, Australia
Shillan Shebly is a Kurdish scholar-organiser from Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan) and a settler on the lands of the Yalukit-willam Bunurong people of the Kulin Nations in so-called Australia. Shillan’s current PhD research at the University of Melbourne uses her lived experiences to explore how the criminalised standpoint can contribute to abolitionist and anti/decolonial presents and futures. She has been an active organiser in grassroots politics for over a decade, contributing to the achievements of the Bendigo Street and Transform IPCS campaigns among many others. Shillan predominantly publishes in non-traditional formats including documentary, photography, creative non-fiction, digitised community radio (3CR), zines and workshops and she is an active member of the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and the Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS).
