Each year, nearly 600,000 Americans are released from prison and join a population of 20 million people who live with a felony record.

Incarcerated people in the U.S. are met by more than 48,000 laws, policies and administrative sanctions upon release, a supervised society that Reuben Jonathan Miller calls “carceral citizenship.”

Join Professor Miller as he examines the afterlife of mass incarceration, attending to how U.S. criminal justice policy has changed the social life and altered the contours of American Democracy one family at a time, most often impacting poor Black families. Drawing on ethnographic data collected across three iconic American cities—Chicago, Detroit, and New York—we will explore what it means to live in a supervised society and how we might find our way out. Respondents Broderick Johnson and Anna Haskins will discuss Reuben’s book and how it fits in with their own work. Audience Q&A will follow.

Reuben Jonathan Miller is an assistant professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration (SSA) and a special advisor to Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan. 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" (February 2021), based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, their families, partners, and friends.

Respondents:
Broderick Johnson, senior of counsel at Covington & Burling law firm in Washington, D.C. and special advisor to Poverty Solutions at U-M

Anna R. Haskins, assistant professor of sociology, Cornell University

Hosted by H. Luke Shaefer, Director of Poverty Solutions and Hermann and Amalie Kohn Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy and Associate Dean for Research and Policy Engagement, at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy

Advanced Praise for Halfway Home:
“[A] beautifully written, stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation’s carceral system …” Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy and U-M professor