Allan Weaver

Speaker

Allan was born and raised in Saltcoats, Ayrshire in Scotland. He began offending at the age of 12 and subsequently spent more than a decade steeped in an offending lifestyle. This culminated in years of detention in various penal institutions across the country. After returning to school at the age of 31 and obtaining Higher qualifications, he attended the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow gaining his Diploma and BA in Social Work. He has been employed by North Ayrshire Council as a Criminal Justice Social Worker for over 20 years and has been a Team Manager for the past 16, during which time he completed his MSc in Criminal Justice and obtained a Practice Award in Advanced Criminal Justice Studies. He is also a qualified Practice Teacher and has supported a number of students through their placements. His autobiography ‘So You Think You Know Me?’ was published in 2008 by Waterside Press and he played the narrator and protagonist in the film ‘The Road From Crime’ produced in 2012. Allan has spoken at various public events, sharing his experience of desistance to inform the developing dialogues surrounding desistance focused policy and practice as well as developing innovative practices to support desistance in practice.

Shadd Maruna

Speaker

Shadd is currently a professor of criminology at the University of Manchester (UK). He has previously worked at Rutgers University (USA), Queen’s University Belfast, the State University of New York, and the University of Cambridge (UK). His book Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives was named the “Outstanding Contribution to Criminology” by the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in 2001, and he was the recipient of the inaugural Howard League for Penal Reform Research Medal in 2012. His other books include: Rehabilitation: Beyond the Risk Paradigm (2007), After Crime and Punishment: Pathways to Ex-Offender Reintegration (2004), The Effects of Imprisonment (2005), and Fifty Key Thinkers in Criminology (2010). He is currently co-editing the sixth edition of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology.

Deirdre Healy

Speaker

Deirdre, BA, PhD has been a Lecturer in Criminology at the UCD Institute of Criminology/ Sutherland School of Law since 2010. Her teaching and research interests include desistance from crime, reintegration, community sanctions, criminological theory and victimisation. Deirdre has a track record of high-quality publications in peer-reviewed international and Irish journals, such as Theoretical Criminology and the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. She has also published a number of books including: the Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology (with Claire Hamilton, Yvonne Daly and Michelle Butler; Routledge, 2015); The Dynamics of Desistance: Charting Pathways Through Change (Willan, 2010) and Rape and Justice in Ireland (with Conor Hanly and Stacey Scriver; Liffey Press, 2009).

Joanna Shapland

Speaker

Joanna is the Edward Bramley Professor of Criminal Justice and Director of the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has researched widely on desistance, restorative justice, probation and victimology, and is the main editor of Global Perspectives on Desistance: Reviewing what we know and looking to the future (with Stephen Farrall and Anthony Bottoms, Routledge, 2016). With Tony Bottoms, she has been directing the Sheffield Desistance Study, a longitudinal study of early desistance in young adult men.

Stephen Farrall

Speaker

Stephen Farrall is Professor of Criminology in the Centre for Criminological Research at the University of Sheffield. he is the author or co-author of "Rethinking What Works With Offenders", Willan Publishing, Cullompton, Devon (2002), "Understanding Desistance from Crime", Open University Press, London (2006, with Adam Calverley) and "Criminal Careers in Transition: The Social Context of Desistance from Crime", Oxford University Press, Oxford (2014, with Ben Hunter, Adam Calverley and Gilly Sharpe), all of which report on the longitudinal study of desistance which he has been running since 1996. Most recently he has co-edited "Global Perspectives on Desistance", London, Routledge (2016, with Joanna Shapland and Tony Bottoms).

Vivian Geiran

Speaker

Vivian is Director, since August 2012, of the Probation Service, an agency of the Department of Justice and Equality, with 395 staff, providing offender assessment and probation supervision programmes to over 8,000 offenders in the community, as well as in the country’s fourteen prisons every day. He is a member of the Department of Justice & Equality Management Board, the Parole Board, the Penal Policy Review Group, President of the Council of Europe’s Council for Penological Co-operation (PC-CP), and Co-Chair of the (North-South) Public Protection & Registered Offenders Advisory Group. Vivian is a registered social worker, joined the Probation Service, as a Probation Officer, in 1987, and held a variety of posts at different levels, up to his appointment as Director

Michael Donnellan

Speaker

Michael was appointed Director General of the Irish Prison Service, in December, 2011. Since his appointment Michael has set about delivering on his vision of a prison service built on respect for human dignity.

Prior to his appointment as Director General, Michael served as Director of the Probation Service from 2005. Before this he served as Director of two children detention schools in Dublin. He has previous experience in health and social services in the UK.

Michael is a member of GLEN's Diversity Champions Business Ambassador Council. The Ambassador Council is a gathering of senior business leaders who are committed to supporting GLEN make Irish workplaces LGBT inclusive.