Faculty Affiliates researching Mass Criminalization and Incarceration
- Danielle Allen, Director, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics; James Bryant Conant University Professor
- Marcella Alsan, Angelopoulos Professor of Public Policy, HKS
- Cornell William Brooks, Hauser Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit Organizations; Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice, HKS; Director, The William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice
- Andrew Manuel Crespo, Professor of Law, HLS; Executive Faculty Director, Institute to End Mass Incarceration, HLS
- Will Dobbie, Professor of Public Policy, HKS
- Nancy Gertner, Senior Lecturer on Law, HLS
- Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy, HKS; Suzanne Young Murray Professor, Radcliffe
- Christopher Muller, Professor of Sociology
- Alexandra Natapoff, Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, HLS
- Sandra Susan Smith, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice; Faculty Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management
- Kaia Stern, Lecturer on Education, HGSE
- Brandon Terry, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, FAS
- Dehlia Umunna, Clinical Professor of Law, HLS; Faculty Deputy Director, Criminal Justice Institute, HLS
- Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies
- Crystal S. Yang, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law, HLS
Affiliated Programs and Initiatives
- The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice (HLS)
- The Health Inequality Lab (HKS)
- Institute to End Mass Incarceration (HLS)
- Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety (FAS)
- Prison Studies Project
- The William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice (HKS)
- The Social Costs of Pretrial, Court-Ordered Electronic Monitoring (PCJ)
- Why Prosecuting Nonviolent Misdemeanor Offenses Yields Poorer Outcomes (PCJ)
- California’s Automatic Record Clearance: Understanding the Potential Impacts on Justice-Involved Individuals (PCJ)
- The Difference A Day Makes: How Spending Even One Day in Jail Can Have Devastating Consequences (PCJ)
- The Effect of Non-Prosecution on Racial Disparities (PCJ)
Selected Publications
- Christopher Muller and Alexander F. Roehrkasse. "Falling Racial Inequality and Rising Educational Inequality in US Prison Admissions for Drug, Violent, and Property Crimes." 2025. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122: e2418077122.
- Alsan, Marcella, and Crystal Yang. "The Hidden Health Care Crisis Behind Bars: A Randomized Trial to Accredit U.S. Jails." NBER Working Paper Series, January 2025.
- Alex Chohlas-Wood, Madison Coots, Sharad Goel, Joe Nudell, Julian Nyarko, Emma Brunskill, and Todd Rogers. Automated Reminders Reduce Incarceration for Missed Court Dates: Evidence from a Text Message Experiment. Working paper. (2023).
- Gaebler JD, Barghouty P, Vicol S, Phillips C, Goel S (2023) Forgotten but not gone: A multi-state analysis of modern-day debt imprisonment. PLoS ONE 18(9).
- Alsan, Marcella, Crystal S. Yang, James R. Jolin, Lucy Tu, and Josiah D. Rich. "Health Care in US Correctional Facilities—A Limited and Threatened Constitutional Right." New England Journal of Medicine 388, no. 9 (2023): 847-852.
- Smith, Sandra Susan, and Cierra Robson. "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Social Costs of Pretrial Electronic Monitoring in San Francisco." HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP22-014, September 2022.
- Sandra Susan Smith. Pretrial Detention, Pretrial Release & Public Safety. Arnold Ventures Public Safety Series Discussion Paper, July 2022.
- Andrew Manuel Crespo, "No Justice, No Pleas: Subverting Mass Incarceration Through Defendant Collective Action." Fordham Law Review 90(5), April 2022.
- Isabella Jorgensen and Sandra Susan Smith, "It’s time for Massachusetts to eliminate cash bail." CommonWealth, April 30, 2022.
- Jorgensen, Isabella, and Sandra Susan Smith. "The Current State of Bail Reform in the United States: Results of a Landscape Analysis of Bail Reforms Across All 50 States." HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP21-033, December 2021.
- Sandra Susan Smith, Tom Shirley, Damarcus Bell, and Isabella Jorgensen. "Pretrial Detention." Social Policy Data Lab, 2021.
- ‘I Just Felt So Violated’: Harvard Researcher’s Study Shows ‘Devastating’ Effects of Jailing People Pretrial. National Partnership for Pretrial Justice.
- Kaia Stern. "The Keeper and the Kept." Inquest, July 27, 2021.
- Alexandra Natapoff. Atwater and the Misdemeanor Carceral State, 133 Harv. L. Rev. F. 147 (2020).
- Will Dobbie, Hans Grönqvist, Susan Niknami, Mårten Palme, and Mikael Priks. The Intergenerational Effects of Parental Incarceration. NBER Paper No. 24186 (2019).
- Allen, Danielle. (2018). Cuz : An American Tragedy. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
- Natapoff, Alexandra. (2018). Punishment without crime : How our massive misdemeanor system traps the innocent and makes America more unequal. New York: Basic Books.