Bio

Dr. Janet Garcia-Hallett is an Assistant Professor at the University of New Haven in the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences.  Her research is primarily focused on the detrimental impact of incarceration on communities of color and the intersectional obstacles women of color face before, during, and after incarceration. Her book, titled Invisible Mothers (under contract with the University of California Press), explores how mothers of color navigate motherhood post-incarceration, and how their reentry into the community is shaped by mothers’ treatment and experiences at the intersection of gender, motherhood, racial-ethnic background, and criminal record. In doing so, her book examines the concept of visibility in how social institutions treat mothers of color as invisible mothers restricted from equal opportunities, but also simultaneously as visible (m)others who are criminalized and penalized for surviving their circumstances.

Over time, Dr. Garcia-Hallett has also received numerous awards for her work, including the Rutgers Presidential Fellowship, the Rutgers Dissertation Fellowship, the American Society of Criminology Graduate Fellowship for Ethnic Minorities (currently known as the Ruth Peterson Fellowship for Racial and Ethnic Diversity), as well as the Racial/Ethnic Minority Graduate Scholarship from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Dr. Garcia-Hallett’s scholarship can be found in The Prison Journal, Sociology Compass, the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, and Feminist Criminology in which she received an Honorable Mention for the Feminist Criminology Helen Eigenberg Best Article of the Year Award for 2019.