ABOUT US

Panopticon Consulting is a group of dynamic, flexible and enthusiastic consultants who provide assessments, advice, support, training and documentation for prison and correctional systems around the world.

Panopticon Consulting is led by Dr Shane Bryans, an international criminal justice and prison expert with over 25 years’ experience of prison management and penal reform. Shane personally manages all projects and works with a select and trusted group of consultants to bring a diverse range of expert skills and experience to add value to any project or assignment. Each project team can call on a range of part-time specialists including a researcher, lawyer, proof reader, training designer; and administrator to support their work.

Dr Shane Bryans

Shane is a Visiting Professor at Staffordshire University Law School, UK and a Associate of the International Centre for Prison Studies (Essex University, UK). He has visited more than 20 countries to provide advice and support on their prison systems on behalf of individual governments, international organisations; UN agencies; European Union and the Council of Europe. This has involved missions to a number of European countries and to Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, Haiti, Nigeria, Uganda, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia and Mongolia. He spent three years living in Turkey as the Council of Europe’s advisor to Turkey on its Penal Reform and Judicial Modernisation Programme and six months in Libya as the Senior Advisor to the Minister of Justice in 2013.

Shane has a Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Law and Criminology (University of Cambridge), a Master of Business Administration degree, a Master of Education degree, and a Doctorate in law (London School of Economics and Political Science) that focused on prison management. Shane has been a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development since 1995. He is a PRINCE2 qualified project manager, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
He has worked as an operational prison director and prison policy specialist for over 25 years. His last post as an operational post was director of the maximum-security prison in England for young prisoners. For a number of years Dr Bryans was deputy head of the prison staff training college responsible for the training of 45,000 prison staff in the UK, before moving to prison headquarters and the Home Office (Ministry of Interior) to work on criminal justice strategic planning, policy and finance. More recently, he was Deputy Regional Director for the Midlands region in the UK with responsibility for Criminal Justice.

Shane has brought together his extensive operational experience and sound academic grounding to write a number of books on prison management and numerous articles on prison theory and management. His main publications include: Prison Governors: Managing prisons in a time of change (2012 paperback); Prisons and the Voluntary Sector: A Bridge into the Community (with Roma Walker and Clive Martin, 2007); Prisons and the Prisoner: An Introduction to the Work of Her Majesty’s Prison Service (with Rachel Jones, 2001); The Prison Governor : Theory and Practice (with David Wilson, 1998). Most recently, he wrote the UNODC Handbook on Dynamic Security and Prison Intelligence (2015).