Staff profile

Dr David Patton


He/Him

Associate Professor in Criminology

David Patton through a camera lense whilst filming a MOOC for drug recovery

Subject

Criminology

Research centre

Centre for Applied Social Sciences, Policy, Practice and Research

ORCiD ID

0000-0003-1801-0189

Campus

Derby Campus

Email

d.patton@derby.ac.uk

About

I am an Associate Professor in Criminology with a research-led focus on lived experience, decoloniality, and participatory approaches to justice and recovery. My work explores how people with lived experience of addiction, incarceration, and marginalisation can shape knowledge production, policy, and practice through creative, critical, and community-led research and initiatives.

I lead several international projects that centre lived experience as a form of epistemic resistance, including Recovery Atlas, a global photovoice archive, and New Central Media, a publishing platform amplifying the voices of lived experience authors.

I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy with over 25 years of experience in Higher Education.  He is an international keynote speaker and has presented at the United Nations on several occasions.

David’s current research includes international collaborations with the World Federation of Therapeutic Communities and partners across Latin America and Africa, exploring the decolonising potential of therapeutic communities and recovery movements. His broader academic and community work is grounded in the ethics of care, reciprocity, and epistemic justice, seeking to transform systems of recovery and justice into spaces of healing, inclusion, and hope.

Research interests

My main research interests include:

I have worked as a Senior researcher for Cambridge University, and worked on research for the Home Office, NIHR, ESRC, Big Lottery Fund, local authorities and the third sector. I have worked on NIHR, ESRC and Big Lottery-funded projects exploring drug recovery. The projects I have worked on have helped create drug legislation, (providing the police with the power to drug test arrestees who have committed an acquisitive crime) and informed government drug strategies.

I have also been Director of a Home Office-funded Drugs Education Project at Sheffield Youth Justice Service and worked as a Life Coach for the Youth Justice Board to promote desistance and help young people reintegrate into education and employment.

My research interests include using the often marginalised voices of those with lived experiences of crime and drug use to formulate utopian visions of how the criminal justice system and society can be radically transformed to promote human flourishing. So that, in time there will be little need to support those in desistance and drug recovery, as these have become largely relegated to history.

Recent publications

Patton, D, & Day, E (2025) 'Lived Experience Recovery Organisations: Epicentres for personal change and collective transformation', New Central Media.

Best, D; Collinson, B; Patton, D (2025) 'Community Recovery Capital and How it Contributes to Building Recovery Capital at the Individual Level'; The Recovery Capital Handbook; Bristol University Press.

Patton, D, Brierley, A & Wheatley, M (2025) 'Recovery Capital Pathways Through Prison', New Central Media.

Patton, D & Nisic, M (2025) 'Women's Recovery Capital Pathways', New Central Media.

Nisic, M., Best, D., Patton, D., Ford, T., & Heine, S. (2025). What constitutes a women’s recovery from addiction? Examining lived experiences and recovery capital of women from diverse European backgrounds. Addiction Research & Theory, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/16066359.2024.2446861

Patton, David. 2024. "The Power, Capacity, and Resiliency of Women in Substance Use Disorder Recovery to Overcome Multiple and Complex Housing Transitions" Social Sciences 13, no. 4: 206. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci13040206

Nisic, M., Patton, D., & Best, D. (2024). Discovering the real self - examining the change in quality of life of people in recovery through art-based research. In J. De Maeyer, M. Florence, S. Savahl, M. Yu, & W. Vanderplasschen (Eds.), Springer Handbook on addiction, recovery and quality of life: Cross-cutting perspectives from around the globe. Springer.

Nisic, M., Kovacevic-Jovanovic, M., Hajzler, C., Best, D., Patton, D., & Van Steenberghe, T. (2024). Recovery, recovery capital and quality of life. In J. De Maeyer, M. Florence, S. Savahl, M. Yu, & W. Vanderplasschen (Eds.), Springer Handbook on addiction, recovery and quality of life: Cross-cutting perspectives from around the globe. Springer.

David Best, Arun Sondhi, David Patton, Valeria Abreu, Thomas Martinelli, Lore Bellaert, Wouter Vanderplasschen & Mulka Nisic (2024) A cluster analysis of European life in recovery data: what are the typical patterns of recovery experience?, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, DOI: 10.1080/09687637.2024.2311841

Matthew J. Belanger, Arun Sondhi, Amy A. Mericle, Alessandro Leidi, Maike Klein, Beth Collinson, David Patton, William White, Hao Chen, Anthony Grimes, Matthew Conner, Bob De Triquet, David Best, (2024) 'Assessing a pilot scheme of intensive support and assertive linkage in levels of engagement, retention, and recovery capital for people in recovery housing using quasi-experimental methods', Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment: 158; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.josat.2023.209283.

Patton D, Best D, Pula P, Hollandy Y, (2023)The culture of recovery: An antidote to coloniality. Addict Criminol. 2023;6(5):16

Patton, D. Best, D. & Brown, L (2022): Overcoming the pains of recovery: the management of negative recovery capital during addiction recovery pathways, Addiction Research & Theory, https://doi.org/10.1080/16066359.2022.2039912

Abreu Minero, V., Best, D., Brown, L. Patton, D;  Vanderplasschen, W (2022) Differences in addiction and recovery gains according to gender – gender barriers and specific differences in overall strengths growth. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 17, 21 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13011-022-00444-8

Best, D., Hargreaves, C., Hodgson, P., & Patton, D. (2022). Recovery communities: Resources and settings. In J. A. Tucker & K. Witkiewitz (Eds.), Dynamic pathways to recovery from Alcohol Use Disorder: Meaning and methods. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108976213

Patton, D. and Farrall, S. (2021), Desistance: A Utopian Perspective. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 60: 209-231. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12406

Patton, D (2018) “Navigating Drugs at University: Normalisation, Differentiation and Drift?; Safer Communities journal: 17 (4), pp.224-237; DOI 10.1108/SC-01-2018-0002

Patton, D (2004) ‘Normalizing the Deviant?: Arrestees and the Normalization of Drug Use’; British Journal of Community Justice; Vol 2 (3)

Patton, D (2004) ‘An Exploration of the External Validity of Self-Report amongst Arrestees’, Surveillance & Society Journal, Vol 2 (4)

Membership of professional bodies

Qualifications

I am also an accredited interpersonal conflict mediator, an MBTI (Myers–Briggs Type Indicator) consultant, a Belbin Team Roles consultant and a life coach.

Recent conferences

Experience in industry

I have over 20 years’ experience working across the criminal justice, drug and alcohol, and community recovery sectors. My work bridges academic research, policy development, and lived-experience-led practice, with a particular focus on decolonising systems of care and supporting community-led responses to addiction and offending.

I am the Founder and Director of New Central Media, a decolonial publishing initiative that collaborates with people with lived experience of addiction, recovery, and imprisonment. The initiative has published three major books, featuring 42 lived experience authors.  The Recovery Capital Pathways Through Prison book has been accepted as national evidence for a Parliamentary review of prison-based recovery with a foreword by Dame Carol Black. New Central Media positions lived experience as expertise, disrupting extractive models of research and creating self-sustaining, ethical knowledge exchange platforms.

I have been involved in various projects aimed at young people and/or drugs. For example, I was Director of a Drugs Education Project based at Sheffield Youth Offending Team, aimed at drug prevention, reduction, crime reduction and harm minimisation among young people who were justice involved and school children. The project received £30,000 of Communities Against Drugs funding.

I have trained Community Panel Members to administer restorative justice sentences to young people who were justice-involved involved who had received a Referral Order by the Youth Court. 

The Youth Justice Service commissioned me to deliver life coaching sessions to high-risk young people who were justice involved on a ten-week alternative-to-custody programme to help them consider their progression into further education, training and employment as well as reduce the frequency and gravity of their offending.

I was also heavily involved as a regular speaker for AimHigher, encouraging students from wider participation backgrounds to enter Higher Education.

International experience

I have extensive international experience developing collaborative research and practice partnerships across Latin America, Africa, and Europe. My work engages with global networks of therapeutic communities, recovery movements, and decolonial scholars to explore the intersections of addiction recovery, community healing, and epistemic justice.

Recent international activities include:

This international engagement informs my teaching, supervision, and research leadership, ensuring that global perspectives and decolonial methodologies are embedded throughout my work.

Teaching responsibilities

I teach on the BSc Criminology programme and a number of MSc programmes across the Department of Social Sciences as well as supervising PhD, postgraduate and undergraduate research.

I have been nominated for numerous teaching awards by my students at all three universities I have worked for, including the Exceptional Contribution to Education Award, Lecturer of the Year award, and Inspirational teaching award among others.

I also contributed toward the Criminology team at UoD winning the Learning and Teaching Prize by the British Society of Criminology.

I possess two postgraduate teaching certificates.