Baroness Vivien Stern CBE
Baroness Vivien Stern is Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS) at King’s College, London, a university centre dedicated to the study of imprisonment and its uses around the world. She is also an Honorary President of Penal Reform International (PRI), an NGO promoting penal reform throughout the world, of which she was a founder member and secretary-general from 1989-2005.
In 1999 she was appointed as an independent member of the House of Lords. She is currently a member of the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. From 1999-2003 she was a member of the European Union Committee of the House of Lords.
In 2003 Baroness Stern became the Convenor of the Scottish Consortium on Crime and Criminal Justice. She is also a member of the Scottish National Advisory Board on Offender Management, which advises the Scottish Executive (the government of Scotland) on penal policy.
From 1977 to 1996 she was Director of a British non-governmental organisation, the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders.
She has written many books on penal matters. She has a particular interest in health care in prisons and in 1999 she edited Sentenced to Die? The problem of TB in prisons in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, published by ICPS and available in English and Russian. She has studied alternatives to prison around the world and in 2002 she produced Developing Alternatives to Prison in East and Central Europe and Central Asia (published by COLPI, Budapest in English and Russian). Her other books include A Sin Against the Future: Imprisonment in the World (1998) and Creating Criminals: People and Prisons in a Market Society (Zed Books) 2006.
She has been involved in many organisations worldwide. She is currently a Trustee of the Eisenhower Foundation of Washington DC and a member of the Advisory Board of ILANUD (the United Nations Latin American Institute on Crime Prevention and the Treatment of Offenders). She has worked with the Council of Europe, the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and has lectured and given advice in many countries in all regions of the world.