Joni Reef is an Associate Professor of Criminology and a Research Fellow in Criminal Justice at the Department of Criminology at Leiden University.

More information about Joni Reef

Dr Joni Reef has been affiliated with the Faculty of Law at Leiden University since 2010. Within criminology and criminal law, she has a strong focus on educational innovation, visual science communication and societal impact. She previously worked at the universities of Maastricht, Utrecht and Rotterdam. In 2010 she obtained her PhD (Erasmus MC, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Psychology) with the dissertation Adult Consequences of Child Psychopathology.

Teaching

Joni provides innovative teaching in criminology and criminal law and, together with Michiel van der Wolf, teaches the course Forensic Psychiatry and the new Skills Labs. She was a Teaching Fellow of the Leiden Teachers' Academy, obtained the Senior Teaching Qualification (SKO) and became a Comenius Teaching Fellow and Senior Fellow. She is vice-chair of the SKO Assessment Committee and completed the Educational Leadership Programme (LDE). She coordinates the revision of the Bachelor's curriculum in Criminology. Her teaching focuses on transformative learning, experiential learning, impact education, the SDGs and the Inner Development Goals.

Prison and lived experience 

With the Comenius Senior Fellowship, Joni and Jennifer Doekhie developed Learning Behind Bars: a learning pathway in which students, lecturers and incarcerated people work together on societal and criminological issues. This strengthens inclusivity, engagement and a people-centred prison practice. Joni considers it important that research and teaching actively incorporate the perspective of the end user of policy, so that practice is better aligned with those who experience the consequences of policy.

Research

Joni has more than 15 years of experience conducting research in Dutch prisons on the effects of imprisonment, fatherhood in prison and the mental health of incarcerated people. She has studied young people in the PIJ (placement in a youth custodial institution), is conducting long-term research on young suspects in the youth justice institution (JJI) and observation clinic Teylingereind, and studies a wide range of themes concerning patients with a TBS order (compulsory forensic psychiatric treatment).

Publications