Dr Richard Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh, UK. He studied at Queen Mary, University of London (BA), the University of Edinburgh (MSc), and the University of Cambridge (PhD). At Cambridge he studied at the Institute of Criminology and Trinity Hall.

He has previously served as a member of the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Criminology and a member of the International Advisory Board of the European Journal of Criminology. He has been an External Examiner for DPhil and MPhil degrees at the University of Oxford, a guest seminar leader on the MPhil criminology degree at the University of Cambridge, and External Examiner for the MSc in Security and Risk Management degree at the University of Leicester. From 2016-19 he was Director of Postgraduate Taught Studies at Edinburgh Law School. In 2009-2010 he was an Academic Visitor at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, Richard Jones was a Research Associate at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Overview:

Dr Richard Jones specialises in studying the implications of new technologies in crime, crime prevention, policing and criminal justice. 

He has undertaken research in the fields of cyber security, cybercrime, surveillance, security, resilience, and penal populism.

He has published and given papers on topics including the electronic monitoring ('tagging') of offenders, access control, border controls, computer crime, penal populism, the media, airport security, the use of force in policing, and surveillance theory. His research interests include: cyber security; surveillance; AI; policing cybercrime; policing and crime prevention technologies; resilience; surveillance technologies; political ideologies; and criminal justice policy.

Richard is currently a Co-I on AP4L, a large, EPSRC-funded interdisciplinary research project developing next-generation privacy-enhancing tools to help safe online users who are experiencing a major life transition. He has previously been a member of the Advisory Board for the EPSRC-funded project ACCEPT (Addressing Cybersecurity and Cybercrime via a co-Evolutionary aPproach to reducing human-relaTed risks), and a Co-I on the IRISS (Increasing Resilience in Surveillance Societies) Project that was a large collaborative research project on the role of surveillance and resilience in democratic societies, and was funded by the European Commission under its FP7 framework. He was also an External Expert on Cybercrime for the FIDUCIA project (also funded under the European FP7 framework), part of which focused on cybercrime and its prevention within Europe.

Richard Jones is a member of the research group CRISP (Centre for Research on Information, Surveillance and Privacy), a collaborative group involving Edinburgh, Stirling and the Open University. He has a long-standing interest in computers and new technology and their use both by offenders and in law enforcement. He is a member of CeSeR (Centre for Security Research, University of Edinburgh).

Richard teaches both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. At undergraduate Honours level he teaches a course on Punishment and Society. As postgraduate level he teaches courses on Cybercrime and Cyber Security, and on Surveillance and Security; these postgraduate courses are available to those taking the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice, the LLM in Law, and the MSc in Global Crime, Justice and Security degree, as well as various other Masters degrees offered in the Law School and in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The following Masters dissertation topics are among those that Dr Jones has supervised: airport security and surveilance; predictive policing; policing drugs cryptomarkets; cryptography and crime prevention; cyber-warfare and cyber security; cybercrime and cyber security in China; intelligence agency reform; and the privacy implications of data mining and data integration by law enforcement agencies.

Dr Richard Jones specialises in supervising theoretical or theoretically-informed qualitatitve empirical research in criminology and related fields, in particular on topics relating to new technologies, cyber, security, or criminal justice policy.

Dr Jones welcomes enquiries from highly-qualified prospective PhD students. He has previously co-supervised several doctorates to successful completion, including doctoral theses by Dr Shane Horgan, Dr Jamie Buchan, Dr Ben Collier, Dr Gemma Flynn, Dr Griff Williams, Dr Richard Bethune, and Dr Neil Olley.

Dr Richard Jones's Homepage at Edinburgh Law School