How America's Public Safety System
Hurts Our Democracy

America jails more than three times as many people today than in 1980 and now leads the world for incarceration rates. One third of America’s adult population has been pulled into the criminal justice system and are now on file in at least one state. The effects on our democracy range from the denial of vote to felons in some states to deeper alienation from the basic rights of citizenship. Professor Vesla Weaver maps out the corrosive effects of America's criminal justice system that leaves millions of Americans and especially minorities convinced that government is closed, hostile, and arbitrary.

Vesla Weaver

Vesla Weaver was on the faculty of the University of Virginia before coming to Yale in 2012. Weaver is broadly interested in understanding racial inequality in the United States, how state policies shape citizenship, and the political causes and consequences of the growth of the criminal justice system in the United States. Her newest book project with Amy Lerman, Policing Citizenship: America’s Antidemocratic Institutions and the New Civic Underclass, is concerned with the effects of increasing punishment and surveillance in America on democratic inclusion, particularly for the black urban poor. She is also the author of Frontlash: Civil Rights, the Carceral State, and the Transformation of American Politics, which uncovers a connection between the movement for civil rights and the development of punitive criminal justice. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order, which explores how multiracialism, immigration, the genomics revolution, and generational changes are reshaping the racial order in the United States (with Professors Jennifer Hochschild and Traci Burch). Weaver’s research has been supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Brookings Institution. She has previously worked for the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. At the University of Virginia, she spearheaded the Working Group on Racial Inequality.

Chris Uggen

Chris Uggen is Distinguished McKnight Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He studies crime, law, and deviance. His writing appears in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Law & Society Review and in media such as the New York Times, The Economist, and NPR. With Jeff Manza, he wrote Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. His research, teaching, and advising interests include punishment and reentry, citizenship, substance use, discrimination, and health inequalities. His outreach and engagement projects include editing Contexts Magazine (from 2007-2011) and The Society Pages (with Doug Hartmann) and Public Criminologies (with Michelle Inderbitzin and Sara Wakefield).