Vicky Gadd

Vicky Gadd For media enquiries please contact the Press Team
Senior Lecturer
Faculty:
Faculty of Arts, Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
School:
Humanities and Social Sciences
Location:
Cambridge
Areas of Expertise:
Criminology , Policing
Research Supervision:
Yes

Victoria is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, and Course Leader for ARU's BA (Hons) Criminology and BA (Hons) Criminology and Sociology. Her research interests lie in prisons and penology, specifically prison management and administration.

[email protected]

Background

Victoria joined ARU in September 2012 after two years working as a sessional lecturer for the University.

She came from a research position at the Prisons Research Centre, Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University, where she had worked since 2005 on conceptualising and measuring prisoner and prison staff quality of life. 

Victoria has undertaken several consultancy projects for the Prison Service and Home Office using her prisons research experience and has overseen several training sessions for Prison Service colleagues in the use and administration of quality of life surveys in prison. She has also previously worked for a private social research organisation researching sentencing in UK courts.

Currently, Victoria is finishing her PhD at the Institute of Criminology, entitled Investigating effective and successful senior management teams in public sector prison. She was funded by a CASE studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Prison Service and is supervised by Professor Alison Liebling.

The research focuses on the role and importance of the senior management team in developing and maintaining a 'high-performing' prison. It employed appreciative ethnographic methods and quantitative data collection in order to investigate the main research question: 'How does a good senior management team look, talk, act and think?'

Research interests
  • Prisons and imprisonment
  • Prison management
  • Prisoners and the experience of imprisonment
  • Prison staff and the role of the prison officer
  • Justice theory
  • Research methods
Areas of research supervision
  • Prisons and imprisonment
  • Prison management
  • Prisoners and the experience of imprisonment
  • Prison staff and the role of the prison officer
Qualifications
  • PhD Criminology, University of Cambridge (in progress) 
  • PG Cert, ARU (2015)
  • Bsc Applied Psychology, Cardiff University (2004)
Selected recent publications

Written contribution to 2009 House of Commons Justice Committee investigation into the role of the prison officer.

Gadd, V., in preparation. What do we know about effective Senior Management Teams in public sector prisons?

Gadd, V., in preparation. A Typology of Prison Senior Management Style and Effectiveness.