Holly Bird she/her

Working title of PhD: “Pop-up prisons”, carceral change, and penal expansion(ism).

Institution: University of Glasgow

Year Commenced: 2025

Full or part-time: Full time

Funding Source: ESRC (SGSSS)

Supervisors: Professor Sarah Armstrong and Dr Tilman Schwarze

Synopsis: 

Holly’s PhD will focus on carceral expansion in the UK – particularly through the development of ‘rapid deployment cells’, known as ‘pop-up prisons’ or ‘pods’. This research aims to explore the relationships between the state and the private sector companies contracted and subcontracted to design, build, and assemble these structures, and to theorise the ways in which commitments to large-scale prison construction fit within a wider political, ideological, and historical picture of penal expansion.

Before beginning her PhD, Holly was a researcher at the Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (based at the University of Strathclyde), working across a number of projects relating to children in conflict with the law. Previously, she was based in London as Research and Policy Officer at StopWatch UK, a criminal justice charity committed to turning a spotlight on stop and search, police abuse of power, and the over-policing of racialised and marginalised communities. She has also worked on a range of criminal justice topics as a freelance researcher, including women’s problem-solving courts, stop and search and other police powers, civil-criminal hybrid orders (in particular, serious violence reduction orders and knife crime prevention orders), and deaths in custody.

Keywords: prison expansion, punishment, private sector