Reuben Jonathan Miller (born in 1976) is an American writer, sociologist, criminologist and social worker.[1] He teaches at the University of Chicago in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation.
Reuben Jonathan Miller
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Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
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Miller studies social life at the intersections of race, justice and social welfare policy, attending to what our systems of punishment and care tell us about ourselves and the moral and ethical state of a given nation. His research has been published in journals of law, criminology, human rights, sociology, public health, social work and psychology. In 2022, he was awarded a "genius grant" through the MacArthur Fellows Program for his work tracing the long-term consequences of incarceration and prisoner re-entry on families in the United States and the ways that mass incarceration has changed the social life of the American city.[2]
He is the author of the 2021 book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration.[3] Halfway Home makes the case that once incarcerated, one is never truly free. Rather, "prison follows you like a ghost," shaping everyday interactions and altering the contours of American democracy one (most often poor and Black) family at a time. Following incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and people directly (and indirectly) impacted by the incarceration of their loved ones, Miller draws from his experience as the brother and son of formerly incarcerated men to make sense of how mass incarceration shapes American citizenship and the work people with records do each day to find and make dynamic lives for themselves and their families. Halfway Home was a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Affairs.[4][5] It won the 2022 Herbert Jacob Book Prize and two PROSE Awards, one for Excellence in Social Science and the other in Cultural Anthropology and Sociology from the Association of American Publishers.[6][7]
Miller was born in Chicago. He earned a B.A. from Chicago State University (2006), an A.M. from the University of Chicago (2007), and a PhD from Loyola University Chicago (2013).[8][9]
Miller began his career as a volunteer chaplain at the Cook County Jail.[10] Upon completing a doctorate in sociology in 2013, he worked as an assistant professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. In 2016, he was awarded membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 2017 he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2021. Earlier that year, he published his first solely authored book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. In 2022, Miller was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his research on the ways that incarceration has shaped the social world and its long-term impacts on the poor (especially poor Black people) in the United States.[9]
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