Dr. Reuben Jonathan Miller – this week at Boston College

Wednesday, November 13, 7pm – Gasson Hall, Chestnut Hill

MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and University of Chicago sociologist Dr. Reuben Miller is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. As a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and as a sociologist studying mass incarceration, he has spent years alongside prisoners, formerly incarcerated people, their families, and their friends to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work reveals is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison.

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“To be cut off from family for years — to be too far away for regular visits. To watch so many of your closest relationships fray and then dissolve. To see your children grow up through family pictures. To be hungry for days at a time because the food you eat is never enough, and there is nothing you can do about it. To be isolated. To be in a place with thousands of men but to somehow feel alone. This is what it means to be socially dead. To be subected to violence and humiliation. To be shackled, one to another, during daily routines, your ability to work and provide for yourself taken away. To move in a coffle down long hallways like animals for ‘feeding time’ of ‘meds.’ To be marched away from your lover and your children every time visitation ends. To be cut off from the human community or to have no community at all — at least, no community that might be valued by members of a free society. To have few benefits and fewer protections. To become a figure who walks the yard or haunts the neighborhood so many years after your release, unable to find work or secure a home, unable to participate in the politics of the city in the ways most people find meaningful. To have no say over where or how often you connect with people you love. To be made a ‘nonperson,’ in the words of sociologist Orlando Patterson, who gave us the term ‘social death.’ To be at once part of the wider world, through labor or punishment or as a social problem of national concern, yet to be kept just outside of it.” ― Reuben Jonathan Miller.

This is a hybrid event is also available online via Zoom. Learn more here.