Alumni Ellie Horwood’s Work on Empathy Features in Leading Penal Reform Bulletin

Ellie Horwood, D4C graduate of 2019-20, has had her dissertation work on empathy and the prison system featured in a leading penal reform organisation’s annual Bulletin. The Howard League for Penal Reform, founded in 1866, works to see less crime, safer communities and fewer people in prison, and its latest Early Career Academic Network Bulletin invited contributors to reflect on the year 2020. As they put it on their website description of this issue of the Bulletin: 2020 has been a year of crisis, a “year in which novel issues have emerged, while other long-standing issues have re-emerged into public consciousness…Structural inequalities have been laid bare by violence and injustice in the criminal justice system. Recognition of a global climate crisis rumbles on in the background. No one issue stands alone.”

Ellie’s work ‘Empathy – What’s the Story?’ (a featured project on this website) responds to this theme of a year of crisis. Congratulations are due to Ellie on this publishing of her work. Speaking about the inclusion of her work in the bulletin, Ellie says that this can “perhaps be a bit of inspiration for anyone in this year’s cohort who is on the fence with reaching out to potential participants or partners for their projects. I dreamt big and pushed hard with my outreach, thinking that in all honesty in the midst of a pandemic my project would probably be almost wholly secondary research, but I was very wrong!”

Ellie has now also been officially appointed by the Ministry of Justice to be on the Independent Monitoring Board for HMP Cookham Wood Young Offenders Institution, which houses 15-18yrs old boys who are on remand or are sentenced, in Rochester, Kent, UK. The volunteers, such as Ellie, on the IMB for Cookham Wood help to ensure that proper standards of care and decency are maintained at the Institution.

Here is the link to the bulletin:  https://howardleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ECAN-Issue-48-June-2021.pdf and Ellie’s Dissertation project can be found in our Projects section here.