Vickie Barrett

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I joined the Department of Behavioural and Social Sciences as a Lecturer in Criminology in June 2021 shortly after completing my PhD. I completed my doctoral studies in the School of Law at the University of Sheffield, following completion of an MA in International Criminology also at the University of Sheffield.

During the course of my PhD, I taught on a range of modules on the BA in Criminology in the School of Law and on the BA in Sociology with Criminology in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, these included: Comprehending Criminology, Analysing Crime Data, Criminology Research Project, Youth Crime and Justice, and Crime, Justice and Social Policy. Following completion of my PhD, I was an Associate Lecturer for a short period (January to April 2021) teaching Research Methods (quantitative) and Motivational Interviewing and Behavioural Change in the College of Health, Wellbeing, and Life Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University. I also worked as a Research Assistant (April to June 2021) in the School of Law at the University of Sheffield administering a survey and undertaking quantitative and qualitative analysis on a project investigating students’ sense of belonging, engagement, and self-confidence.

Prior to returning to academia in 2016 to complete my MA and PhD, I worked for eight years as a probation officer in the National Probation Service. As part of the probation officer training, I completed a BA (Hons) in Community and Criminal Justice and an NVQ Level 4 in Community Justice (Working with Offending Behaviour) at De Montfort University. Prior to this, I completed a P.G.C.E in Post-compulsory Education and Training at Sheffield Hallam University and worked for a number of years teaching languages (I completed my first degree in Modern Languages at the University of Huddersfield in 1998) in secondary and further education.

Interest in my research area stemmed from my professional experience as a probation officer; I observed the impacts of policy decisions on the experiences of individuals on probation across multiple policy areas. My PhD research takes a multi-disciplinary approach (criminal justice, education, and welfare) to examining punitiveness towards ‘rulebreakers’ over the past forty years and considers the social consequences of punitive policy responses to rulebreaking behaviours. The study employs a newly designed web-based survey of almost six thousand respondents, in addition to interviews with members of the public during the design phases of the new survey questions. Additionally, I explore trends in legislation, political discourse, and public attitudes over the past forty years to examine the extent to which the sanctioning (sentencing, school punishments, welfare sanctions) of ‘rulebreakers’ across different regulatory systems has become embedded in British society. Quantitative analyses are applied to examine the relationship between public punitiveness towards ‘rulebreakers’ and political values (neo-conservativism, neo-liberalism) and nostalgia (social, economic and poltical).