Bio

Reuben Jonathan Miller studies social life at the intersections of race, punishment and social welfare policy. He is completing a book titled Halfway Home based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated people, their family members, partners and friends. Miller conducts fieldwork in Chicago, Detroit, and New York City, examining how law, policy and emergent practices of state and third-party supervision have changed the contours of American citizenship, activism, community, and family life. To capture the effects of crime control under different social policy regimes, Miller conducts fieldwork in Glasgow and Belgrade, and is launching “On the Tracks of Empire,” a global study of punishment and social policy in the port cities that were most involved in the transatlantic slave trade.

A native son of Chicago, Miller is an alumnus of Chicago State University (BA 06), the University of Chicago (AM 07) and Loyola University Chicago (PhD 2013). Before joining the faculty at SSA, he was an assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan, where he served as a faculty associate in the Population Studies Center and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Afro American and African Studies, and a 2016 Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Social Science.