Reuben Jonathan Miller

Reuben Jonathan Miller (born September 23, 1976) is an American writer, sociologist, criminologist and social worker from Chicago, IL. 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.

Miller studies 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 reentry on families throughout the United States and the ways that mass incarceration has changed the social life of the American city.

He is the author of the 2021 book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. 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 America John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the LA Times Book Prize for Current Affairs. It won the 2022 Herbert Jacob Book Prize and two PROSE Awards from the Association of American Publishers.