Entries by Jeffrey Ian Ross

Why developing a literacy of graffiti and street art is important

If you see or interpret graffiti and street art only through a legal, criminal justice, and property rights lens then it is unabashedly and unequivocally vandalism. But graffiti and street are more than this. In order to go beyond the tropes, misinformation, and common place explanations of this predominantly urban art form you need to […]

Urban Street Ethnography Interruptus

Every semester, for almost a decade, I close out the term, by giving my undergraduate students, enrolled in my Contemporary Criminal Justice System class, the option of conducting a very basic urban street ethnography. Almost all of my students have graduated from a two year program in Criminal Justice from a local community college. Some […]

Prison Tropes “R” Us: Why it’s so damn hard to reform correctional facilities in the United States and what can we do change this state of affairs

Lots of things are standing in the way of reforming correctional facilities, the controversial practices that occur inside them, and the people who work there. This is not because we haven’t accumulated a respectable amount of peer-reviewed research that provides advice on all manner of ways to improve jails and prisons. And it’s not simply […]

Should people who didn’t follow the CDC guidelines to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 be given priority for treatment in overflowing and understaffed hospitals?

One of the most important pressing moral questions of our time, that few of us want to ask or answer, is should people who have disregarded or intentionally ignored CDC guidelines to minimize the spread of COVID-19 and end up in the emergency rooms and intensive care units of our hospitals with corona virus symptoms […]