Heading to #ASA2023 and #SSSP2023 tomorrow! Can’t wait to reconnect with ppl and meet some new folks. If you’re interested in punishment, social control, or crime, I hope you’ll join me & my stellar fellow panelists at the ASA Deviance and Social Control panel on Saturday @ 2pm.

Welcome Assistant Professor Greg Wilson, PhD to the Glenn College! Wilson is a member of the Provost’s Tenure-Track Fellow to Faculty program. He is a Faculty Fellow in the Justice Labs of America at Brown University and a Fellow in NYU Stern. Learn more: bit.ly/3EDIFH4

New Publication! In Punishment and Society, our team documents "The Prison Bust." Prison closures have outpaced prison openings for more than 20 years. Read more here: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/HBPNZF6…

We've concentrated a lot on the rise of mass incarceration and the prison boom, but we've been surprisingly slow to ask about the prison "bust." It turns out, prisons are closing faster than new ones open. So why the heck are we seeing this surprising decline in prisons? 🧵

Along come John “renegade teacher and scholar” Eason Erin Eife @kaitmsims @jacob_w_harris Justice Labs of America and their team of collaborators with a brilliant new paper. What if the political economy of prison building sowed the seeds for its own failure?

If we look at the geographic characteristics of prison closures, they're concentrated in those places that were the MOST aggressive in building prisons as part of a local economic development strategy—hoping to create jobs and stimulate secondary industries by caging people.

As John “renegade teacher and scholar” Eason Erin Eife @kaitmsims @jacob_w_harris and company rightly point out, turning the prison bust into a positive requires not only curbing prison supply, but also prison demand—improving well-being to reduce crimes of survival, poverty, and disadvantage.

Congrats to Erin Eife. She has been an excellent post doc with us, and will do great things at Criminology, Law and Society at Mason!

Huge congratulations to Chiara Packard! She has been a phenomenal colleague and will do great things at University of Utah!

Check out this new project from our fellow Benny Witkovsky on hate crimes in Wisconsin!

New Publication! In "Punishment Is Purple" out now Punishment and Society, our team highlights the bipartisan face of the Prison Boom across rural America: doi.org/10.1177/146247…

NEW PUB: Decriminalization and racial disparities in Cannabis arrests. Check it out at Sociology of Race & Ethnicity journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

New project by director John “renegade teacher and scholar” Eason aimed at creating prison abolition as policy urban.org/projects/reduc…

Check out new blog by John “renegade teacher and scholar” Eason and Urban Institute colleagues on curbing prison demand urban.org/urban-wire/cur…

To prevent exacerbating the already dire situation, we propose a halt to the opening of any new facilities and consider closing facilities with repeated human rights violations. The evidence is clear: expansion of immigrant detention causes harm… urban.org/urban-wire/ice…

Read about John “renegade teacher and scholar” Eason's agenda for justice and research-informed prison closures in rural America in the The Daily Yonder today! dailyyonder.com/advocates-call…

ICE Says Immigrant Detention is “Non-Punitive.” The Evidence Tells a Different Story. — John “renegade teacher and scholar” Eason recently co-authored a piece for Urban Institute. ow.ly/1kTN50SejEO

New Publication at Journal of Crime and Justice! Our team examines the relationship between rural prisons and domestic violence. Congrats @kaitmsims, John “renegade teacher and scholar” Eason, @chloehaimson, and Isabel Anadon!

Big congratulations to Benny Witkovsky (Benny Witkovsky), one of our student fellows, who has received the ASA DDRIG!

Did you hear about the new article that explores the impact of building prisons on intimate partner violence by @kaitmsims, Isabel Anadon, John “renegade teacher and scholar” Eason, and @chloehaimson? Read the full article at the Journal of Crime and Justice: rb.gy/9na7mm