Julie Laursen

Since completing her PhD in 2016, Julie has established herself as one of the Nordic region’s leading prison researchers, with over 30 articles published in international journals. Her work focuses on how welfare‑state penal policies are enacted in practice within Nordic prisons, including how these policies are experienced by both staff and prisoners. Owing to the relevance and impact of her research, she was recruited to a highly competitive ERC‑funded project at the University of Cambridge (2016–2020), which examined the quality and standards of Nordic prisons.

As part of the largest empirical study of prisons to date — comprising 750 interviews and 1,000 surveys — Julie and her colleagues investigated whether Nordic exceptionalism should be understood as absolute (“prisons in the Nordic countries are humane”) or relative (“prisons in the Nordic countries are more humane than elsewhere”). This was done through a systematic comparison of Norwegian and English prisons. The project’s publications have since shaped international prison research.

Julie is currently engaged in two major projects within the Danish Prison and Probation Service: one examining prison architecture and another focusing on order and security in Danish prisons