I am a renegade scholar, teacher, mentor, and recovering community/political organizer having worked across neighborhoods on the Southside of Chicago and serving as a Director of Field Operations for then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama.
I am now the Watson Family University Associate Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University and a Senior Research Fellow in the Justice Policy Center and the Office of Race and Equity Research at the Urban Institute where I lead the project on Reducing Prisons in Rural Communities of Color. I am also the Founder and Director of the emerging Justice Policy Lab @Brown University providing research opportunities and mentoring to junior scholars.
I use mixed-methods research to create theoretically informed, emperically driven, policy relevant research to inform how we think about place, health, race, punishment, and rural/urban processes. In addition to numerous articles, book chapters, blogs, and Op-eds, I am the author of
Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation, at the University of Chicago Press. My work on COVID in confined spaces and prison proliferation is funded by the National Science Foundation.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/big-prison-myth-mass-incarceration-reform.html
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/prisons-and-the-rural-ghetto/
