ICPR wins public engagement award for its prisons research

Birkbeck’s annual Public Engagement Awards recognise and celebrate researchers who have undertaken innovative and exemplary public engagement activities. ICPR has won this year’s Birkbeck Public Engagement award in the category ‘public participation in research’. This category recognises projects in which the involvement of the public or various publics is an inherent part of the research process.

ICPR’s prisons researchers Catherine Heard, Helen Fair and Jessica Jacobson, worked on the project ‘Understanding and reducing the use of imprisonment in ten countries’ between 2017 and 2021. The research focused on a diverse group of ten jurisdictions: Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, the United States, India, Thailand, England & Wales, Hungary, the Netherlands and Australia.

Throughout the project, the ICPR team collaborated with a wide range of research and policy partners including criminal lawyers, academics, prisoners, ex-prisoners and civil society organisations, in the ten countries and beyond.

The Birkbeck awards also recognised Camillia Kong, Penny Cooper and Rebecca Stickler of ICPR, for their project 'Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law’, which was highly commended in the category ‘public empowerment’.

This project has sought to explore the deeper values that bear on the judicial deliberative process in interpreting the Mental Capacity Act’s principles and procedures, such as the status of the subject of proceedings (P’s) participation in legal proceedings about capacity and best interests.