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As a chaplain at Cook County Jail in Chicago and as a sociologist studying mass incarceration, 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.
Miller’s book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, is a portrait of the many ways mass incarceration reaches into American life, sustaining structural racism and redrawing the boundaries of our democracy.
Miller walks alongside many people as they navigate the tightrope of a highly restrictive society often at direct odds with the requirements of their parole, relegated to a “hidden social world and an alternate legal reality.” Weaving throughout his own struggle to support his brother navigating the criminal justice system, Miller lays plain how this “afterlife” of incarceration catches loved ones in its net as well.
Drawing from 15 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.
Dr. Miller is Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago's Crown Family School of Social Work, Public Policy and Practice and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Formerly, he was 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. A native son of Chicago, he lives with his wife and children on the city’s South Side. Learn more: https://bit.ly/reuben-miller.
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