Criminologist, Scholar, & Consultant

Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D., is a criminologist and Professor at the University of Baltimore, specializing in corrections, policing, political crime, crimes of the powerful, street culture, and graffiti and street art.

Before becoming an academic, Ross worked as a courier, taxi driver, corrections worker, and union shop steward. This background shapes his research approach, rooted in firsthand contact with the institutions and communities he studies, as a corrections worker, street-level ethnographer, and researcher who has visited correctional facilities across North America, Europe, and South America. He has also conducted firsthand research on street culture, graffiti and street art internationally.

This background informs research that examines evidence often overlooked by those without direct experience inside correctional facilities or on the streets.

Ross is co-founder of Convict Criminology, a field built on the principle that the voices of people who have been incarcerated have historically been ignored or marginalized in scholarship and policy debates, and that including them can positively impact the fields of corrections, criminology, criminal justice, and policy making.

He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 30+ books, including Introduction to Convict Criminology (2024) and Letters to a Young Criminologist (2026). He is the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art and the Routledge Handbook of Street Culture. His research appears in leading academic journals and popular media.

Ross has delivered keynote addresses at universities in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States.

He has appeared on CNN, CNBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and NBC, and written op-eds for The Hill, Inside Higher Ed, and the Baltimore Sun.

He has held visiting professorships at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) and the University of Padua (Italy), and served as a Social Science Analyst with the National Institute of Justice (1995–1998).

Ross received the Hans W. Mattick Award (2018), the American Society of Criminology’s Division of Convict Criminology’s John Keith Irwin Distinguished Scholar Award (2020), the John Howard Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (2020), and the University of Baltimore’s Distinguished Chair in Research Award (2003).

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