Dialogue: Dr. Keesha Middlemass and Reuben J. Miller
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 20/07/2021

A partnership with SFP’s Jail and Reentry Services Department and Oakland Public Library

Dr. Keesha Middlemass and Ruben Jonathan Miller will discuss the politics, race and policies of incarceration and reenetry. 

Dr. Keesha Middlemass (She/Her/Hers) is a trained political scientist who is on faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She is a nationally known expert in conducting interdisciplinary research using empirical data to study how race, policies, politics and the law impacts marginalized populations. Specifically, she studies the holistic experience of how men and women reenter society after serving time in prison by incorporating interviews, focus groups, participant observation, policy analysis and ethnography to better comprehend the lived experience of moving from prison to society. Her approach purposefully fills in critical gaps in understanding reentry, including community, individual deficits, trauma of incarceration and food insecurity. Her work includes her award-winning book, Convicted & Condemned: The Politics and Policies of Prisoner Reentry (NYU Press, 2017), and multiple articles that explore how policies create perverted incentives for men and women reentering society after serving time in prison. Dr. Middlemass is a former Andrew Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow on Race, Crime and Justice at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City and a former American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. from The School of Public & International Affairs at the University of Georgia.

Reuben Jonathan 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 is the author of the 2021 book, Halfway Home : Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. Miller 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. A native son of Chicago, he lives with his wife and children on the city’s Southside.