Loyola Sociology Alum Reuben Miller Keynote at 2022 New Student Convocation

Loyola's 2022 New Student Convocation featured keynote speaker Reuben Jonathon Miller, Loyola alum, and professor at University of Chicago.  Miller highlighted the many ways that the criminal justice system creates obstacles for those who enter it.  His work is published in his book,Halfway Home; Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration.  You can read more about Miller's work from NPR here,

...those who leave incarceration are in many ways never truly free. They instead become members of the "supervised society" — and it is this uniquely disenfranchised population that is the focus of his book.

This indictment of the criminal justice system should trouble the soul of the nation. Miller writes in prose that is at once powerful and engaging — and combines an abundance of data with the lived experiences of the people the numbers represent. A sociologist, criminologist, social worker, and former chaplain at Chicago's Cook County Jail, his insights are partly drawn from having spent 15 years interviewing nearly 250 people caught up in the prison industrial complex. This work included a research project during which he spent three years engaging with 60 men and 30 women after their release from incarceration in Michigan. Miller can also claim far more experiential expertise, because he was "born black and poor in the age of mass incarceration" and, like every Black person he knows, "was stopped by the police a number of times." He is a scientist armed with statistical information, and he is the son and brother of incarcerated men.

In October of 2022, Dr. Miller was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellow Genius Award! Here is an article in the Chicago Sun Times profiling him.