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Halfway Home: A Conversation with Reuben Miller

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book cover for "halfway home"Dr. Reuben Jonathan Miller 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.

In this special event hosted by the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, University of Chicago Professor Reuben Miller will discuss his new book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. Cornell Professors Anna Haskins, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann and Jamila Michener will join Dr. Miller in a conversation about the impact of incarceration on individuals, families and communities, and the challenges facing released individuals.

This virtual event is co-sponsored by the PRICE Initiative, Cornell Prison Education Program and the Cornell American Studies Program and is free and open to the public.


Reuben Jonathan Miller

University of Chicago sociologist Dr. Reuben Miller is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, a “persuasive and essential” (Dr. Matthew Desmond) book that offers a “stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation’s carceral system” (Heather Ann Thompson). Working as a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, Miller spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked, truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast.

Drawing on fifteen years of research and his own experience as the son and brother of incarcerated men, Miller captures the stories of the men, women, and communities fighting against a system that is designed for them to fail. NPR calls the book an “indictment of the criminal justice system [that] should trouble the soul of the nation.” A Chicago native, Miller is a sociologist, criminologist and a social worker who teaches at the University of Chicago in the School of Social Service Administration where he studies and writes about race, democracy and the social life of the city. He has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation and a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and Dartmouth College.

Speaker

Reuben Miller →University of Chicago

Date

April 19, 2021 | 7:00 pm