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 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 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.

Notable Works

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Miller, Reuben Jonathan. Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. Little Brown and Co. 2021.

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Miller, Reuben Jonathan. "All Leviathan’s Children: Race, Punishment and the (Re-) Making of the City." In Class, Ethnicity and State in the Polarized Metropolis, pp. 215-229. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019.

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Miller, Reuben Jonathan, and Forrest Stuart. "Carceral citizenship: Race, rights and responsibility in the age of mass supervision." Theoretical Criminology 21, no. 4 (2017): 532-548.

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Miller, Reuben Jonathan & Amanda Alexander. “The price of (carceral) citizenship: Punishment, surveillance and social welfare policy in an age if carceral expansion.” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 21 (2): 291-311 2016).

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Miller, Reuben Jonathan, Janice Williams Miller, Jelena Zeleskov Djoric, & Desmond Upton Patton. “Baldwin’s Mill: Race, Carceral Expansion and the Pedagogy of Repression, 1965-2015.” Humanity and Society, 39(4): 456-475 (2015).

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Miller, Reuben Jonathan. "Devolving the carceral state: Race, prisoner reentry, and the micropolitics of urban poverty management." Punishment & Society 16, no. 3 (2014): 305-335.