ICCJ Annual Lecture 2023

Speaker: Professor Jonathan Reuben Miller, University of Chicago

Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Each year, nearly 600,000 Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record. Incarcerated people in the U.S. are met by nearly 45,000 laws, policies and administrative sanctions upon release, a supervised society that Reuben Jonathan Miller calls “carceral citizenship.” In his lecture, Professor Miller will examine the afterlife of mass incarceration, attending to how U.S. criminal justice policy has changed the social life of cities and altered the contours of American democracy one (most often poor black American) family at a time. Drawing on ethnographic data collected across three iconic American cities—Chicago, Detroit, and New York—he will explore what it means to live in a supervised society and how we might find our way out. Audience Q&A will follow.

Speaker's bio:

Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. He was named a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. A native son of Chicago’s Southside, Dr. Miller received his PhD from Loyola University Chicago, an AM from the University of Chicago, and a BA from Chicago State University. His research examines life at the intersections of race, poverty, crime control, and social welfare policy. He is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (2021), based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, their families, partners, and friends.

The ICCJ Annual Lecture is sponsored by the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work and the School of Law at Queen's University Belfast.