MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and University of Chicago sociologist Dr. Reuben Miller is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. As a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and as a sociologist studying mass incarceration, he has spent years alongside prisoners, formerly incarcerated people, their families, and their friends to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work reveals is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison.

Miller is an associate professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. Before coming to Chicago, he was an assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan, a faculty affiliate with the Populations Studies Center, the Program for Research on Black Americans, and the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a fellow at New America and the Rockefeller Foundation, and a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and Dartmouth College. A native son of Chicago, he lives with his wife and children on the city’s South Side.

Cosponsored by the Boston College PULSE Program for Service Learning, Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, Forum on Racial Justice in America, and Sociology Department.

Made possible by the Gerson Family Lecture Fund, established by John A. and Jean N. Gerson, P'14, and Jaclyn Gerson Rossiter '14.

This lecture is hybrid. You can register to watch our livestream via Zoom here.