A new book considers the life and pioneering work of Margery Fry, the woman who created the modern Howard League for Penal Reform.
Written by Dr Anne Logan, a social historian at the University, the book, entitled The Politics of Penal Reform: Margery Fry and the Howard League (Routledge, November 2017), celebrates the Howard League’s 150th anniversary last year and places Fry’s legacy in a historical context.
Dr Logan, of the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, analyses the impact of Fry, who shaped the modern Howard League and dominated it from 1918 until her death in 1958.
She examines Fry’s work as a campaigner for an international standard of prisoners’ minimum rights, which resulted in a United Nations charter, for the introduction of compensation for victims of criminal injuries and for the abolition of the death penalty.
The book also considers her role in the establishment of criminology as an academic discipline and her organisation of the first criminology lectures in Great Britain. It is essential reading for all those engaged in prisons research, penal reform and criminal justice history.