Keramet Reiter

Keramet Reiter studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems. She uses a variety of methods in her work — including interviewing, archival and legal analysis, and quantitative data analysis — in order to understand both the history and impact of criminal justice policies, from medical experimentation on prisoners and record clearing programs to gun control laws and the use of long-term solitary confinement in the United States and internationally. In addition to her research, she has a long-standing commitment to prison education; she has taught in prisons in Massachusetts and California and founded a prison education program on Rikers Island in New York City. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Punishment & Society; Director of LIFTED, a program to offer University of California BA degrees to incarcerated students; and the co-founder of UCI PrisonPandemic, a digital archive of incarcerated Californian’s stories of living through the COVID-19 pandemic.