HALFWAY HOME: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

You are cordially invited to join us in person for a Research Seminar of the SOAS School of Law, Gender and Media featuring Professor Reuben J Miller of the University of Chicago, who will talk about his groundbreaking new book.   

• speaker: Professor Reuben Jonathan Miller (University of Chicago)
• chair: Dr Vanja Hamzić (SOAS University of London) 

MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow, Professor J Miller is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, a “persuasive and essential” (Matthew Desmond, Evicted) book that offers a “stunning, and deeply painful reckoning” (Heather Ann Thompson) with the US carceral system. 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. Halfway Home is a portrait of the many ways mass incarceration reaches into American life, sustaining structural racism and redrawing the boundaries of democracy. Drawing from fifteen years of research, over 250 in-depth interviews with citizens whose lives have been touched by the criminal justice system and his own experience as the son and brother of incarcerated Black men, Miller shows how the American carceral system was not created to rehabilitate. Instead, he reveals how its design keeps classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they’ve “paid their debt” to society.

Reuben is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity. He is also a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. In 2022, Miller was named a MacArthur Fellow. Prior to joining the Crown Family School, Miller was an Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan where he served as a Faculty Associate in the Population Studies Center and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies.

His work has been published in journals of criminology, human rights, law, psychology, sociology, social work and public health and he is frequently called upon to offer commentary on issues of crime, punishment, racism and poverty. His first sole authored book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, an ethnography based on 15 years of research and practice with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones, won the Herbert Jacob Book Prize from the Law and Society Association, two PROSE Awards from the Association of American Publishers and was a finalist for a PEN America/John Kenneth Galbraith Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize. A native son of Chicago, Miller received his PhD from Loyola University Chicago, an AM from the University of Chicago, and a BA from Chicago State University. Miller lives with his wife and children on the city's Southside.   

Please note: This is not a hybrid event; no Zoom link or recording will be provided.

For any questions, please get in touch via vh1@soas.ac.uk.