我要吃瓜

Jessica Cleary is an ESRC funded part-time Doctoral Researcher in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research within the Faculty of Social Sciences, 我要吃瓜.

Jessica's PhD study explores whether and how the gender-specific needs of women with convictions are addressed within Scotland’s national community justice policies and the community-based responses to women with convictions. The study responds to a central question: Why do the same problems persist in community justice for women despite decades of reform?

Drawing on qualitative data from 30 interviews with policy officials, service commissioners, strategic leads, and frontline practitioners, the project explores how gender-responsive justice policies are understood and enacted across Scotland’s community justice system. It focuses on how national policy goals are interpreted in local service design and frontline delivery, and investigates how these relationships are experienced and navigated in practice – particularly in relation to how women are supported, supervised, and punished in the community. By analysing perspectives across different levels of the system, it considers the wider, interconnected conditions that shape change, and the challenges of sustaining meaningful progress in an area of justice where many of the problems are already well understood, yet persist.

Alongside her PhD Jessica has completed two doctoral internships. First in 2018, Jessica conducted a socio-legal doctoral training partnership evaluation for the SSCJR. Then in 2019 she worked as a member of the Data and Evidence team for the Independent Care Review evaluating the methodologies employed throughout the review’s duration in partnership with Evaluate Support Scotland.

In 2022 Jessica was successfully granted a research award by the Mitacs Globalink UK Research and Innovation scheme to lead a research project at the Université Laval Canada, supported by Prof. Isabelle F.-Doufour, comparatively examining the considerations of gender within Criminal Justice approaches in both Scotland and Quebec.

Alongside completing her PhD part-time, Jessica has held several short-term qualitative research roles for projects spanning social work, criminology and adult social care.

Between 2021-22 she was also an Implementation Lead for a third sector organisation supporting the translation of the Independent Care Review's recommendations into practice for adoption, fostering and kinship care social work teams across Scotland's 32 local authorities.

Jessica’s research interests include:

The Sociology of Punishment and Criminalisation – institutional cultures, policies, practice and lived experiences

Prison Abolitionism and Social Justice

Women and Criminal Justice

Rehabilitation, Resettlement, (Re)integration and Desistance from crime

Qualitative methodologies

Within the Faculty of Social Sciences at the 我要吃瓜 Jessica supports the teaching and learning on several undergraduate modules including:

Gender, Crime and Justice; Crime and Criminal Justice; Crimes of the Powerful;
The Development of Social Theory; Social Research Methods 1 (qualitative) Punishment and Society; Understanding Social Policy; and Social Differentiation;

Between 2024-25 Jessica held a Teaching Fellow position in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Edinburgh Law School. In this post she was the course organiser for core and optional MSc courses including:

Criminal Justice and Penal Processes Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice

She has successfully supervised 5 MSc and 2 LLB dissertation students and previously held an academic year lead role for a 4th year Law Undergraduate cohort.