Marguerite Schinkel joined SCCJR in October 2013 as an ESRC Future Leader Research Fellow. Her post-doctoral research examines how those who offend persistently, but not necessarily seriously, make sense of the series of punishments they undergo. She will be conducting life history interviews with men and women who have been punished over a period of at least fifteen years, followed by a second interview around a year later, to see how interpretations and meaning making processes change over time. For more information on this project see: Lives Sentenced: Experiences of Repeated Punishment. 

Her main research interests are the experiences of those who are punished by the criminal justice system, the implications of these experiences for the philosophy and practice of punishment, how narratives are constructed and their impact on the way experiences are interpreted.

Her post-doctoral research builds on her recently completed doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, which examined how long-term prisoners give meaning to their sentence. Both before and during her PhD she was a researcher at the Criminal Justice Social Work Development Centre for Scotland, where she worked on, amongst other things, the evaluation of Routes out of Prison - a peer-support project for short-term prisoners before and after their release. She has also been self-employed as a researcher. She studied for her Masters by Research in Community Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, with her MSc thesis focusing on the experiences of men who are sent to prison after making positive changes in their lives in the period between offence and sentencing. Her first degree was in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Stirling, where her dissertation examined the justification of imprisonment.

First published: 4 October 2013

<< 2013