In the latest RSW podcast Emily Keddell interviews Fairleigh Gilmour, an academic in Gender studies and Criminology at the University of Otago. Fairleigh has run a volunteering programme into the Milton prison for a number of years, after discovering how few students in her criminology classes had ever been into a prison. Her programmes involve recruiting and training students to develop their own classes and run them for men in the local prison.
This year, she has worked with prison staff and the University of Otago to offer a first year criminology paper to people currently in prison, despite the restrictions on internet access and the difficulties of curriculum commensurability. Fairleigh’s commitment to inclusive education and university -prison partnerships to enable quality educational and recreational activities for people in prison is a great example of commitment to action on inequities in the criminal justice system.
Image credit: Hédi Benyounes on Unsplash