Esther van Ginneken is Associate Professor at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden University.

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Esther van Ginneken is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden University. Previously, she worked at Liverpool Hope University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2014 with the dissertation The pains and gains of imprisonment.

Esther studies prisons from an interdisciplinary perspective, with attention to conditions of confinement, dynamics of violence, and the wellbeing of incarcerated individuals. She is the principal investigator of the Life in Custody Study, a large-scale survey on prison climate in the Netherlands. Additionally, she has conducted several studies on the use of shared cells in the Netherlands and on safety and staff misconduct in criminal justice settings, including women’s prisons. Esther works with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, reflecting the complex social and institutional realities of prison life.

Esther has been awarded an NWO VIDI grant (2023–2027) for research on violence in prisons. This project examines why violence emerges and how staff in prison settings respond to such situations. Within this project, Dante Hoek conducts research into conditions that contribute to violence; she uses virtual reality to simulate conflict situations. Rozalie Lekkerkerk carries out postdoctoral research on the role of staff in violent interactions and how and why conflicts escalate.

As project leader and PhD supervisor, Esther is also involved in an NWO-funded project (2025–2029) on the gender binary in the prison system, conducted by Yara Abbing. In addition, she supervises Jill van de Rijt’s research on normalisation in prison and Sophie Marten’s research on the safety perceptions of incarcerated individuals.

Publications