Dr. Keramet Reiter

Keramet Reiter is Associate Professor of Criminology, Law & Society in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. She holds an M.A. from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York and a J.D. and Ph.D. in Jurisprudence & Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. She studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems. She has evaluated the impacts of: medical experimentation on prisoners, gun control laws, and long-term solitary confinement in the United States and internationally. She is the author of two books: 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement (Yale University Press, 2016) and Mass Incarceration (Oxford University Press, 2017), and the co-editor (with Alexa Koenig) of the anthology Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement (Palgrave Press, 2015) and the principal investigator on projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the Langeloth Foundation. In addition to her research, she has a long-standing commitment to prison education; she has taught in prisons in Massachusetts and California, founded a prison education program on Rikers Island in New York City, and is building a bachelor's program for incarcerated students within the University of California system.