Susette M. Talarico Lecture

MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow and University of Chicago sociologist Dr. Reuben Miller is the author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, a “persuasive and essential” (Dr. Matthew Desmond) book that offers a “stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation’s carceral system” (Heather Ann Thompson).  As a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and as a sociologist studying mass incarceration, he has spent years alongside prisoners, formerly incarcerated people, their families, and their friends to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work reveals is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison.

Miller is an associate professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. Before coming to Chicago, he was an assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan, a faculty affiliate with the Populations Studies Center, the Program for Research on Black Americans, and the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; a fellow at New America and the Rockefeller Foundation; and a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and Dartmouth College. A native son of Chicago, he lives with his wife and children on the city’s South Side.

The Susette M. Talarico Lecture, presented by the Criminal Justice Studies Program and the Criminal Justice Society, is hosted annually in memory of Dr. Talarico, a long-time director of the Criminal Justice Studies Program. With support from the Susette M. Talarico Fund, the Criminal Justice Society, the Departments of Political Science and Sociology, this lecture series has brought practitioners and scholars to campus to speak on a wide variety of current issues in criminal justice.

The 2024 Susette M. Talarico Lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, Department of Sociology, SPIA, Institute for African American Studies, School of Social Work, and the Law School.