Helen Kosc is a Doctoral Candidate in the Sociology Department, at The University of Oxford. She was born in Toronto. She completed a BA (Hons) at Queen’s University, Kingston. As an undergraduate she decided to train to receive a Correctional Service Canada ID and volunteer in Canadian prisons. Four years later, she had worked with over 100 incarcerated offenders across five correctional institutions, running weekly skills workshops and programming. It is her experiences with Correctional Services Canada that inspired her to come to The University of Oxford to study prison reintegration and advocate for re-entry support for prison leavers.
She completed an MSc in Sociology at The University of Oxford with a dissertation on “Freedom Amidst Crisis: Experiences of Inmate Re-entry during the Covid-19 Pandemic, and Implications for Support Networks and Services”, investigating support networks and resources available to those released from prison during the pandemic in the United Kingdom.
For her doctoral research, Helen is working in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice and Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner, investigating the resettlement journeys of 200 prison-leavers released from His Majesty’s Prison Bullingdon in England. This involves ethnographic participant observation and unstructured interviews pre- and post- prison release over the course of 18 months. She hopes to learn about the mechanisms that contribute to the desistence vs persistence of criminal activity by speaking to prison leavers and practitioners directly.
Helen has always been driven to invest in the human rights and dignity of those often ignored by our communities as well as by our criminal justice system. Calling herself an ‘evidence-based activist’, she harnesses research to improve the knowledge and application of prison reintegration policies.
Helen’s extensive research experience in the field of criminal justice includes research assistance for the largest experimental audit study measuring discriminative hiring of ex-offenders in Europe. She has co-authored a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Evidence-Based Crime and Justice Policy, with Dr. David Kirk and published in the International Corrections and Prisons Association’s Advancing Corrections Journal. She is working alongside the Machine Learning Group at the University of Cambridge and Police Scotland on a project investigating how data science and artificial intelligence are understood and applied in policing.
Helen serves as President of the Oxford University Canadian Students Society and hopes to return to Canada for Post-Doctoral research upon completing her PhD.
