Associate Professor
Criminology, Law and Society
University of California, Irvine
Ph.D. Sociology, New York University
J.D., Cornell Law School
cseeds@uci.edu
3375 Social Ecology II
Department
Specializations
Punishment and social control, law and society, social theory, prisons, life sentencing, capital punishment
Christopher Seeds is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He is a sociologist and formerly a defense attorney for people sentenced to death. His research interests encompass punishment writ broadly, including laws, policies, practices, and experiences concerning sentencing, confinement, and prison release. His work takes a historical-sociological approach that generates analyses and theoretical insights from empirically detailed examinations of the legal and penal fields.
His book Death by Prison (University of California Press 2022), examines the emergence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) as a feature of contemporary punishment in the United States. Prior work addressed contemporary sentencing reform initiatives and the ways in which bifurcation between low-level/serious or nonviolent/violent crime operates as a principle, process, and product of those reforms. His current research focuses on end-of-life care in prison and how health and medical care shapes the experience of aging and dying in prison as well as prison administration and social structure.
He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology in 2018 from New York University, supported by awards from the National Science Foundation and Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies. Before then he served as a defense attorney for people sentenced to death in South Carolina and New York, worked a visiting scholar with the Cornell Death Penalty Project, and directed the wrongful convictions clinic at Cornell Law School. His writing on punishment has been published in journals including the Annual Review of Criminology, British Journal of Criminology, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Punishment & Society, and Social Justice. He has authored and coauthored law review articles on a variety of topics related to capital litigation—including ineffective assistance of counsel, cultural competency in mitigation investigation, and intellectual disability and Eighth Amendment jurisprudence—one of which (coauthored with John H. Blume and Sheri Johnson) was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in Moore v. Texas, 137 S. Ct. 1039 (2017). He continues to be active in seeking legal relief and policy reform for incarcerated people serving life or long-term sentences.
At UCI, he teaches courses on the sociology of punishment, theories of punishment, law and society, and US legal thought. He also teaches in LIFTED, the UCI B.A. degree program for students enrolled at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
New Book
Seeds, Christopher. 2022. Death by Prison: The Emergence of Life without Parole and Perpetual Confinement (University of California Press).
Select Recent Publications
Seeds, Christopher. 2024. “Comparing Life Without Parole to the Death Penalty.” In The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society (Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and Austin Sarat, eds.).
Seeds, Christopher, and Dirk van Zyl Smit. 2023. “Extradition and Whole Life Sentences.” Criminal Law Forum 35: 1-37.
Seeds, Christopher. 2022. “Hope and the Life Sentence.” British Journal of Criminology 62(1): 234-250.
Seeds, Christopher. 2021. “Life Sentences and Perpetual Confinement.” Annual Review of Criminology 4: 287-309.
Seeds, Christopher. 2019. “Life Without Parole Sentencing.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press.
Seeds, Christopher. 2019. “Historical Modes of Perpetual Penal Confinement: Theories and Practices Before Life Without Parole.” Law & Social Inquiry 44(2): 305-332.
Seeds, Christopher. 2018. “Disaggregating LWOP: Life Without Parole, Capital Punishment, and Mass Incarceration in Florida, 1972-1995.” Law & Society Review 52(1): 172-205.
Seeds, Christopher. 2017. “Bifurcation Nation: American Penal Policy in Late Mass Incarceration.” Punishment & Society 19(5): 590-610.