In partnership with Impact Justice, City Arts & Lectures presents Reuben Jonathan Miller in conversation with Terah Lawyer on March 8 at 6 p.m. PST.
Reuben Jonathan Miller is a sociologist, criminologist and a social worker who teaches at the University of Chicago in the School of Social Service Administration where he studies and writes about race, democracy, and the social life of the city. His book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, shows that the American justice system was not created to rehabilitate, and how parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they’ve paid their debt to society. Miller has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey, a fellow at the New America Foundation 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 Southside.
Terah Lawyer has been an advocate for incarcerated people for more than a decade as a peer health educator, a certified drug and alcohol counselor, a youth diversion specialist, and now as program manager for the Homecoming Project, an innovative re-entry housing program at Impact Justice. Ms. Lawyer is herself a formerly incarcerated person, and that experience informs her commitment to improving the justice system.
