The Team

Dr Marion Vannier is the Principal Investigator of the HOPE Project. She is also a senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Manchester, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. Her research sits at the intersection of prison sociology, criminal law, and human rights. She is the author of Normalising Punishment: The Case of Life Without Parole in California (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Prisoner Leaders: leadership as experience and institution (Palgrave, 2025). Marion’s work examines life imprisonment, human rights, and the lived realities of incarceration. A key strand of her current research focuses on prisoner leadership, exploring how people in prison take on roles that support their peers, shape carceral relationships, and incite us to rethink the role and purpose of imprisonment. This builds on her wider interest in how humanitarian ideals are translated into experience and penal practice.

She works collaboratively with judges, policymakers, HM Prison and Probation Service, the Ministry of Justice, and the voluntary sector to rethink the role of punishment and to develop more just approaches to imprisonment in an ageing society.

Dr Marion Vannier | Principal Investigator

Dr Helen Gair is the lead Research Associate of the HOPE project, and a Research Associate in Criminology at the University of Manchester. Her research spans criminological and historical perspectives of the lived experience of criminal justice. She is particularly interested in themes of reintegration, desistance and the sociology of community. Helen’s work examines the lived experience of criminal justice involvement and imprisonment through the lens of age, having both researched the experiences of children and young adults as well as older adults. On the HOPE project, Helen has co-led fieldwork within prison sites, and contributed to several outputs including an article on early release for the Prison Service Journal and the Meaningful activities report for Recoop. She is also currently working on an article exploring the peer support of older prisoners.

Vlad-George Zaha is a Romanian public criminologist working at the intersection of criminal and social justice, drug policy, and carceral reform. He earned his BA in Criminology from the University of Manchester and his MSc in Criminology & Criminal Justice from the University of Oxford with Distinction. As a public scholar, Vlad communicates criminological evidence to broad audiences reaching tens of thousands of followers and appearing in hundreds of national media pieces. He has been invited as an expert to multiple Romanian parliamentary and governmental committees and has contributed commissioned research with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Declic Foundation, and the Centre for Democracy and Good Governance. Recent publications address prisoner leadership and drugs, the functioning of the European Public Prosecutor's Office, and evidence-based drug policies around decriminalisation, legal-regulation and driving under the influence.

Vlad-George Zaha | Research Assistant

Advisory Teams

Academic Advisory Team: Professor Ben Crewe (Prison ethnographer and life imprisonment researcher, Institute of Criminology, Cambridge); Professor Lucia Zedner (Law and human rights expert, Oxford); Professor Dirk van Zyl Smit (Human rights and life imprisonment expert, Nottingham University); Professor Ian O’Donnell (Law and prison psychology expert, University College Dublin).

Working Stakeholders’ Advisory Team: Jamie Bennett, Deputy Director, Operational Security Group and William Styles, Deputy Director, Long-term and High Security Group, at HMPPS; individuals with lived experience of prison from the Prisoner Policy Network; Peter Dawson, Director of Prison Reform Trust (PRT), Anita Dockley, Research Director at The Howard League (HL); Olivia Rope, Director of Policy and International Advocacy at Penal Reform International (PRI).

Mentor at UoM: Professor Soren Holm