Mark Halsey

Matthew Flinders Professor of Criminology, Director - ARC Centre of Excellence for Prisoner Reintegration, ARC Industry Laureate Fellow, Flinders University, Australia

Mark Halsey is Matthew Flinders Professor of Criminology, Flinders University, Australia. He is a leading scholar on pathways into crime, experiences of imprisonment, and the conditions which support and thwart desistance from offending. Working with key industry partner Corrective Services New South Wales, Mark currently heads up a $4 million Australian Research Council funded Industry Laureate (1 of 8 nationally) which critically applies an assisted desistance framework in all NSW public prisons. Most recently, Mark (along with an extensive team of Australian based scholars and international partners) was awarded in excess of $35 million by the Australian Research Council to establish a Centre of Excellence for Prisoner Reintegration (1 of 8 awarded in late 2025). His most recent books include the co-edited Power and Pain in the Modern Prison (Oxford) and the co-authored Generations Through Prison (Routledge).

Professor Shadd Maruna

Head of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology , University of Liverpool, England

Professor Shadd Maruna is the Head of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool and the Past President of the American Society of Criminology (2022-2024). Previously he has worked at the University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester, and Rutgers University (USA) where he was the Dean of the School of Criminal Justice. His book Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives was named the Outstanding Contribution to Criminology by the American Society of Criminology, and he was the recipient of the inaugural Research Medal from the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Dr Danielle Rudes

Professor, Sam Houston State University, United States

Danielle S. Rudes is a Professor of Criminal Justice & Criminology at Sam Houston State University in Texas. She is also Deputy Director of the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence (ACE!). She is a former Fellow with the Bureau of Justice Assistance focusing on Enhancing Correctional Spaces and Cultures. Dr. Rudes is an expert qualitative researcher with over 25 years of experience working with correctional agencies. She is recognized for her work examining how social control organizations understand, negotiate, and at times, resist change. Dr. Rudes has a broad grant portfolio with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Justice including her current role as Multiple Principal Investigator on the Justice Community Overdose Innovation Network (JCOIN). She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Substance Use &Addiction Treatment and she is on the editorial boards of several other journals. Her book Surviving Solitary: Living and Working in Restricted Housing Units won the 2023 Outstanding Book Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. Additionally, Dr. Rudes received numerous other awards for her research, mentoring, and teaching including the 2024 Excellence in Research Award from the International Corrections and Prisons Association (ICPA).

Fergus McNeill

Professor of Criminology and Social Work, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow. Prior to becoming an academic in 1998, Fergus worked for a decade in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker. His research projects and publications have focused mainly on institutions, cultures and practices of punishment, rehabilitation and reintegration. As well exploring how increasingly knowledge about desistance from crime might re-shape rehabilitation and reintegration (both within and beyond criminal justice), Fergus’s work has increasingly used creative and ethnographic methods to better understand how criminal justice is experienced, both by those subject to it and by those whose job is to try to realise it in practice. From January 2026-December 2030, Fergus is leading a major 5-year study, funded by the European Research Council’s Advanced Grants scheme, of ‘Rehabilitation and Reintegration in Europe’ (RaRiE), working with colleagues in the Universities of Leiden (Miranda Boone and Hilde Wermink) and Oslo (Thomas Ugelvik).

Dr Kevin Wright

Associate Professor, Arizona State University, United States

Kevin A. Wright is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of the Center for Correctional Solutions at Arizona State University. His work focuses on enhancing the lives of people living and working in the correctional system through research, education, and community engagement. He developed Arizona’s first Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program and co-founded the Arizona Transformation Project, a learning community connecting faculty, students, and incarcerated men and women. He is co-author of Imprisoned Minds: Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison (Rutgers University Press, 2025) and currently serves as Deputy Chair of the ICPA Research and Development Network.

Ian Goodwin-Smith

Matthew Flinders Professor, Dean (Research), College of Business, Creative Arts, Law and Social Sciences Director, Centre for Social Impact (CSI) Flinders Deputy Director (Industry Engagement), ARC Ce, Flinders University, Australia

Ian Goodwin-Smith is the Matthew Flinders Professor of Social Impact, Dean (Research) for the College of Business, Creative Arts, Law an Social Sciences, Director of Centre for Social Impact (CSI) Flinders, and Co-Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Prisoner Reintegration. He is a researcher in the fields of social policy and social service with extensive experience in research and evaluation relating to social service improvement, systems reform and social policy. Ian has a history of working collaboratively with government and non-government organisations, communities and people who have been marginalised, and a long track record of research partnerships, both internationally and in all Australian states and territories, in metropolitan, country and remote settings.

Raphael Tuhafeni Hamunyela

Commissioner General, Namibian Correctional Service, Namibia