Keramet Reiter

Specializations:
prisons, legal history, criminal justice policy, criminal and civil rights law, law and society

Bio:
Keramet Reiter studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems.  She uses a variety of methods in her work — including interviewing, archival and legal analysis, and quantitative data analysis — in order to understand both the history and impact of criminal justice policies, from medical experimentation on prisoners and record clearing programs to gun control laws and the use of long-term solitary confinement in the United States and internationally. She is or has been the principal investigator on projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the Langeloth Foundation, among others. She is the recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and the Cavan Young Scholar Award for outstanding scholarly contributions to the discipline from the American Society of Criminology. She is sole author of two books: 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement (Yale University Press, 2016) and Mass Incarceration (Oxford University Press, 2017).  In addition to her research, she has a long-standing commitment to prison education; she has taught in prisons in Massachusetts and California and founded a prison education program on Rikers Island in New York City. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Punishment & Society; Director of LIFTED, a program to offer University of California BA degrees to incarcerated students; and the co-founder of UCI PrisonPandemic, a digital archive of incarcerated Californian’s stories of living through the COVID-19 pandemic.