Gavin Slade holds a PhD in Criminology from the University of Oxford. Before coming to FU, he was an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on crime and criminal justice in the post-Soviet region. He is especially interested in organized crime and responses to it, prisons and the police. His book 'Reorganizing Crime: Mafia and Anti-Mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia' was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. He is the co-editor of a special issue of Theoretical Criminology on criminal justice in the post-Soviet region, due out in 2015.

About my current research
The camp system of the Soviet Gulag developed complex forms of informal prisoner self-governance. The practices of these governance forms constituted a penal subculture that frames organized crime in the region in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods. My research looks at attempts to dismantle this system in three cases - Lithuania, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. It looks at the consequences of attacks on the subculture under the rubric of prison reform in terms of social order, disturbances and violence.