Andrew (Andi) Brierley is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Trinity University. His research focuses on punishment, rehabilitation, desistance, legitimacy, and the role of lived experience within criminal justice systems. He has published on peer mentoring, prisons, recovery, and lived experience practice, and is currently completing doctoral research in this area.

His work explores how trust, credibility, and authority are negotiated when people with experience of crime, addiction, imprisonment, and marginalisation move into professional and mentoring roles across prison, probation, and community settings. He has particular interests in the changing boundaries between care and control, professionalisation, lived experience work, and the politics of rehabilitation.

Andi’s scholarship combines sociological and criminological theory with grounded practitioner insight, informed by earlier professional experience in youth justice, prisons, social inclusion, and widening participation. He has developed original conceptual contributions including Liminal Legitimacy and Desistance Habitus, examining how embodied credibility and hybrid forms of expertise operate in criminal justice contexts.

Alongside academic research, he has extensive experience working with socially excluded groups and justice-involved populations. This informs a practice-engaged approach to teaching, research, and knowledge exchange. He teaches across criminology, punishment, rehabilitation, prisons, violence, and social justice, and is committed to widening participation and inclusive routes into higher education.

Current projects include research on lived experience roles across prison, probation, and community settings, and the politics of rehabilitation in contemporary criminal justice policy and practice.

Punishment, rehabiltation and desistance 

Legitimacy, trust and authority in criminal justice settings

Lived experience roles in prison, probation and community contexts

Peer mentoring and professionalisation 

Prison sociology and rehabilitation policy

Qualitative and practice-engaged criminlogical research