For nearly 30 years, students and early-career academics have asked me the same questions about building a career in academic criminology: How do you choose a research agenda? How do you navigate tenure? How do you balance teaching, research, and service? What works? What doesn’t?
I’ve answered these questions in office hours, at conferences, over coffee, and in email threads. But I’ve also asked my own questions of mentors, colleagues, administrators, and fellow criminologists at different career stages. Those conversations shaped how I understood the field and navigated my own career.
Letters to a Young Criminologist collects what I’ve learned from three decades as a corrections worker, government researcher, and academic criminologist. It offers the practical advice I wish someone had given me when I started, and the insights I gained from asking questions of people who’d already been through it.
The book is written mostly for undergraduate students, graduate students, and early-career academics in criminology and criminal justice. But it’s also relevant to practitioners in law enforcement, corrections, probation, parole, and the courts who are considering academic work or want to understand how the academic side of the field operates.
It’s not theory. It’s practical guidance drawn from experience, research, and hundreds of conversations, both the questions I’ve been asked and the ones I’ve asked others.
If you’re navigating an academic criminology career or thinking about starting one, this book is meant for you.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2026-04-05-at-12.57.00-AM.png456480Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-04-05 04:58:382026-04-05 12:08:59After Three Decades, Here’s What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
My recent article, published in The Prison Journal, documents how the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) violates the Nelson Mandela Rules. These standards, adopted by the United Nations in 2015, outline the international minimum standards for humane detention.
Drawing on government reports, bipartisan congressional investigations, peer-reviewed research, and investigative journalism, the study identifies fourteen distinct violations across three domains: accommodation standards, healthcare services, and solitary confinement practices.
These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re longstanding patterns that expose federal inmates to conditions that fall well below what the international community considers minimally acceptable.
What the Mandela Rules Require
The Rules, named after the former South African president and anti-apartheid crusader who spent 27 years in prison, establish 122 standards that correctional systems in UN member states should meet. These standards also emphasize human dignity and basic rights for people deprived of their liberty.
The rules aren’t aspirational. They represent what the international community agreed constitutes the basic conditions for humane detention.
The Violations: Three Categories
Accommodation failures. Federal prisons routinely engage in double and triple bunking in cells designed for single occupancy. While the Supreme Court ruled that double-bunking doesn’t violate the U.S. Constitution, constitutional permissibility doesn’t equal compliance with international standards.
The problem extends beyond crowding. Multiple facilities have documented issues with broken toilets, inadequate heating and cooling, pest infestations, and contaminated drinking water. Investigations have found rat fur, arsenic, and copper in prison water supplies at levels exceeding EPA standards. In one case, inmates in New York experienced stomachaches after Hurricane Ida contaminated their water supply in 2021.
Food quality raises additional concerns. Cost-cutting measures, including outsourcing food services to private corporations like Aramark, have led to meals contaminated with vermin. A 2017 CDC study found that prison inmates are 6.4 times more likely to contract a food-related illness than the general population.
Healthcare deficiencies. The Mandela Rules require that prisoners receive healthcare equivalent to community standards. Federal prisons frequently fall substantially short of this benchmark.
Among federal inmates with persistent medical problems, nearly 14% received no medical examination since incarceration. After serious injuries or assaults, 7.7% of inmates didn’t receive a medical examination. Perhaps most troubling: 21% of inmates who required prescription medication for chronic conditions stopped taking their medication after incarceration. This was not by choice, but because the medication wasn’t provided.
Mental health services present their own crisis. The Federal Bureau of Prisons faces chronic shortages of qualified mental health professionals, resulting in delayed assessments, limited ongoing treatment, and inadequate care for complex psychiatric conditions. The gap between stated policy and actual practice is substantial. Facilities have written policies requiring mental health evaluations and treatment, but investigations consistently document that these policies aren’t followed.
Solitary confinement abuses. The Mandela Rules define solitary confinement as confining prisoners for 22 hours or more per day without meaningful human contact. The rules prohibit “prolonged solitary confinement”—anything exceeding 15 consecutive days.
Federal prisons regularly place inmates in solitary confinement for months or years, far exceeding international standards. Perhaps most disturbing: the Bureau places inmates with mental illness or suicidal ideation into solitary confinement, ostensibly for their protection. This practice directly violates international prohibitions and has been shown to worsen mental health conditions rather than ameliorate them.
Why This Matters Beyond Prisons
These violations have consequences beyond the individuals experiencing them.
For extradition cases: European courts increasingly refuse to extradite individuals to the United States based on concerns about prison conditions. The documented violations strengthen legal arguments that extradition would expose individuals to inhuman or degrading treatment prohibited under European human rights law.
For international credibility: Systematic human rights violations in federal prisons undermine U.S. credibility in international forums and its ability to advocate for human rights abroad.
For domestic reform: While U.S. courts have established that certain practices don’t violate constitutional minimums, international standards provide additional leverage for legal challenges and policy reform.
The Path Forward
The study makes the following recommendations: eliminate overcrowding, provide healthcare equivalent to community standards, strictly limit solitary confinement to 15 days maximum, establish independent oversight, and increase transparency through public reporting.
These aren’t radical proposals. They’re minimum standards that most democratic countries already meet. Countries like Norway, Germany, and the Netherlands demonstrate that humane correctional practices are achievable and compatible with public safety.
What’s required is political will. Congress must provide adequate funding and pass oversight legislation. The Department of Justice must prioritize reform and establish accountability. The FBOP must move beyond policy statements to actual implementation.
What Standards Should We Uphold?
The ultimate question is one of values: What standards of human dignity do we wish to uphold as a democratic society?
The gap between current federal prison practices and international standards is substantial. Closing it will require sustained effort, adequate resources, and fundamental shifts in correctional culture. The path forward is clear. What remains uncertain is whether the United States possesses the political will to take it.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2026-03-20-at-11.38.19-AM.png5781508Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-03-26 04:32:262026-03-26 04:41:48How U.S. Federal Prisons Fail International Human Rights Standards
One of my favorite books is New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City by Andrei Codrescu. A poet, essayist, novelist, and professor emeritus at Louisiana State University, Codrescu is also widely known for his commentaries on National Public Radio.
Published in 2006, New Orleans, Mon Amour is primarily a collection of previously published essays (i.e., sixty-six chapters divided into six sections) spanning two decades on the city. Most run two to six pages. In these pieces, Codrescu describes selective aspects of New Orleans, including its bars, its politics, its strange characters, and the rhythms of everyday life, in an intimate and personal way.
I have visited New Orleans several times, mostly as a tourist and conference attendee, and once conducting research for a now-abandoned biography of the surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin (1905–1985).
Mise en Place
Codrescu’s central job is to acknowledge, but push back against, interpreting New Orleans as a series of myths that outsiders, including tourists, have and consume about the city. This includes the numerous spectacles they encounter, such as Mardi Gras excess, the New Orleans Saints football team (not to mention the frequent Super Bowl games held there), and jazz on Bourbon Street.
Codrescu’s counter-argument is embedded in his method. Having lived in the city for nearly two decades, he writes not as a visitor being entertained but as someone whose daily life is entangled with the city’s contradictions. The book’s thesis, never stated but consistently demonstrated, is that New Orleans can only be understood by living there and engaging with its people, customs, and events. This process enables Codrescu to move beyond the tourist gaze, which is typically superficial and superfluous.
This argument gains added weight because Codrescu is a kind of permanent outsider. He emigrated from Romania (Transilvania, no less), built his reputation partly through NPR commentary aimed at a national audience, and spent the bulk of his academic career at LSU rather than at a New Orleans institution. His insider status was earned rather than inherited, which gives him a particular vantage point: close enough to see what tourists miss, self-aware enough to know he is still reading the city rather than simply living inside it.
The Roux
The short-chapter format serves the book’s argument. The complexities of New Orleans are difficult to interpret, and Codrescu’s fragmented, episodic structure mimics the city’s own rhythm, which includes intense encounters followed by laid-back scenes. Because the chapters are largely self-contained, readers who find a particular vignette less engaging can skim and move on without losing the broader thread.
Étouffée
The best essays demonstrate Codrescu’s method at its sharpest. “Against Synchronicity” argues against the New Age tendency to read meaningful coincidence into New Orleans’s density of strange encounters. The city produces lots of bizarre juxtapositions, and pattern-seeking annoyingly prevails. One may not find his argument fully convincing, but it forces a genuine reckoning with how we interpret urban strangeness.
“Prosperity and the Devil” works through a deceptively simple anecdote: a neighbor repairing his house with old-fashioned tools inadvertently drives rats into surrounding homes. The essay uses this incident to explore the city’s paradox of maintenance and decay; the effort to restore one thing inevitably displaces damage elsewhere.
“Fried Rice” recounts the feud between novelist Anne Rice and Al Copeland, the founder of Popeyes. What makes the essay memorable is not the events, but what Codrescu draws from it: that in New Orleans, even cultural conflict gets refracted through food, property, and the specific grievances of adjacent neighbors.
The book’s longest chapter, “My City My Wilderness,” is its most ambitious. Codrescu moves through the city’s recurring themes, such as its unique food, crime, police corruption, and environmental vulnerability. Each theme is treated masterfully and in sufficient detail to give me the sense that I am experiencing the events myself.
The Gristle
The book’s recurring motifs, the humidity, local cuisine, topography, eccentric local personalities, and the figure of Baron Ludwig von Reizstein are occasionally redundant. Admittedly, this is a structural challenge when previously published essays are reprinted and brought together in collection form. What seems like texture across a couple of pieces can feel like repetition across sixty-six.
More substantively, Codrescu’s outsider-insider positioning, which is the book’s greatest strength, is also its quiet limitation. His New Orleans is densely populated with bohemians, academics, and the colorfully marginal. But readers should be aware that this is a very narrow demographic that pales against the city’s numerous working-class, immigrant, and poverty-stricken populations.
Café Brûlot
New Orleans, Mon Amour succeeds most when it resists the temptation to present the city in totally familiar ways. Codrescu’s best essays work the way good urban ethnography works. He is patient and attentive to the visual and sensory qualities of people, places, and things. His book is a useful reminder that there is always far more to the city than most visitors ever see—and that seeing more requires staying longer than most of us do.
The next time I visit New Orleans, I may try to visit some of the bars and restaurants Codrescu frequented. His book is a useful reminder that there is always far more to the city than most visitors ever see and experience, and that this requires staying longer, being more patient and aware than most of us usually are.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/IMG_0446.jpeg640530Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2026-03-15 20:31:362026-03-15 21:42:07Reading Codrescu’s NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR
After Three Decades, Here’s What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
/by Jeffrey Ian RossFor nearly 30 years, students and early-career academics have asked me the same questions about building a career in academic criminology: How do you choose a research agenda? How do you navigate tenure? How do you balance teaching, research, and service? What works? What doesn’t?
I’ve answered these questions in office hours, at conferences, over coffee, and in email threads. But I’ve also asked my own questions of mentors, colleagues, administrators, and fellow criminologists at different career stages. Those conversations shaped how I understood the field and navigated my own career.
Letters to a Young Criminologist collects what I’ve learned from three decades as a corrections worker, government researcher, and academic criminologist. It offers the practical advice I wish someone had given me when I started, and the insights I gained from asking questions of people who’d already been through it.
The book is written mostly for undergraduate students, graduate students, and early-career academics in criminology and criminal justice. But it’s also relevant to practitioners in law enforcement, corrections, probation, parole, and the courts who are considering academic work or want to understand how the academic side of the field operates.
It’s not theory. It’s practical guidance drawn from experience, research, and hundreds of conversations, both the questions I’ve been asked and the ones I’ve asked others.
If you’re navigating an academic criminology career or thinking about starting one, this book is meant for you.
Letters to a Young Criminologist is available April 17, 2026.
How U.S. Federal Prisons Fail International Human Rights Standards
/by Jeffrey Ian RossMy recent article, published in The Prison Journal, documents how the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) violates the Nelson Mandela Rules. These standards, adopted by the United Nations in 2015, outline the international minimum standards for humane detention.
Drawing on government reports, bipartisan congressional investigations, peer-reviewed research, and investigative journalism, the study identifies fourteen distinct violations across three domains: accommodation standards, healthcare services, and solitary confinement practices.
These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re longstanding patterns that expose federal inmates to conditions that fall well below what the international community considers minimally acceptable.
What the Mandela Rules Require
The Rules, named after the former South African president and anti-apartheid crusader who spent 27 years in prison, establish 122 standards that correctional systems in UN member states should meet. These standards also emphasize human dignity and basic rights for people deprived of their liberty.
The rules aren’t aspirational. They represent what the international community agreed constitutes the basic conditions for humane detention.
The Violations: Three Categories
Accommodation failures. Federal prisons routinely engage in double and triple bunking in cells designed for single occupancy. While the Supreme Court ruled that double-bunking doesn’t violate the U.S. Constitution, constitutional permissibility doesn’t equal compliance with international standards.
The problem extends beyond crowding. Multiple facilities have documented issues with broken toilets, inadequate heating and cooling, pest infestations, and contaminated drinking water. Investigations have found rat fur, arsenic, and copper in prison water supplies at levels exceeding EPA standards. In one case, inmates in New York experienced stomachaches after Hurricane Ida contaminated their water supply in 2021.
Food quality raises additional concerns. Cost-cutting measures, including outsourcing food services to private corporations like Aramark, have led to meals contaminated with vermin. A 2017 CDC study found that prison inmates are 6.4 times more likely to contract a food-related illness than the general population.
Healthcare deficiencies. The Mandela Rules require that prisoners receive healthcare equivalent to community standards. Federal prisons frequently fall substantially short of this benchmark.
Among federal inmates with persistent medical problems, nearly 14% received no medical examination since incarceration. After serious injuries or assaults, 7.7% of inmates didn’t receive a medical examination. Perhaps most troubling: 21% of inmates who required prescription medication for chronic conditions stopped taking their medication after incarceration. This was not by choice, but because the medication wasn’t provided.
Mental health services present their own crisis. The Federal Bureau of Prisons faces chronic shortages of qualified mental health professionals, resulting in delayed assessments, limited ongoing treatment, and inadequate care for complex psychiatric conditions. The gap between stated policy and actual practice is substantial. Facilities have written policies requiring mental health evaluations and treatment, but investigations consistently document that these policies aren’t followed.
Solitary confinement abuses. The Mandela Rules define solitary confinement as confining prisoners for 22 hours or more per day without meaningful human contact. The rules prohibit “prolonged solitary confinement”—anything exceeding 15 consecutive days.
Federal prisons regularly place inmates in solitary confinement for months or years, far exceeding international standards. Perhaps most disturbing: the Bureau places inmates with mental illness or suicidal ideation into solitary confinement, ostensibly for their protection. This practice directly violates international prohibitions and has been shown to worsen mental health conditions rather than ameliorate them.
Why This Matters Beyond Prisons
These violations have consequences beyond the individuals experiencing them.
For extradition cases: European courts increasingly refuse to extradite individuals to the United States based on concerns about prison conditions. The documented violations strengthen legal arguments that extradition would expose individuals to inhuman or degrading treatment prohibited under European human rights law.
For international credibility: Systematic human rights violations in federal prisons undermine U.S. credibility in international forums and its ability to advocate for human rights abroad.
For domestic reform: While U.S. courts have established that certain practices don’t violate constitutional minimums, international standards provide additional leverage for legal challenges and policy reform.
The Path Forward
The study makes the following recommendations: eliminate overcrowding, provide healthcare equivalent to community standards, strictly limit solitary confinement to 15 days maximum, establish independent oversight, and increase transparency through public reporting.
These aren’t radical proposals. They’re minimum standards that most democratic countries already meet. Countries like Norway, Germany, and the Netherlands demonstrate that humane correctional practices are achievable and compatible with public safety.
What’s required is political will. Congress must provide adequate funding and pass oversight legislation. The Department of Justice must prioritize reform and establish accountability. The FBOP must move beyond policy statements to actual implementation.
What Standards Should We Uphold?
The ultimate question is one of values: What standards of human dignity do we wish to uphold as a democratic society?
The gap between current federal prison practices and international standards is substantial. Closing it will require sustained effort, adequate resources, and fundamental shifts in correctional culture. The path forward is clear. What remains uncertain is whether the United States possesses the political will to take it.
The full research article, “Do the conditions inside the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities violate the Nelson Mandela Rules on detention? (is available to download and appears in The Prison Journal 2026).
Reading Codrescu’s NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR
/by Jeffrey Ian RossApéritif
One of my favorite books is New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City by Andrei Codrescu. A poet, essayist, novelist, and professor emeritus at Louisiana State University, Codrescu is also widely known for his commentaries on National Public Radio.
Published in 2006, New Orleans, Mon Amour is primarily a collection of previously published essays (i.e., sixty-six chapters divided into six sections) spanning two decades on the city. Most run two to six pages. In these pieces, Codrescu describes selective aspects of New Orleans, including its bars, its politics, its strange characters, and the rhythms of everyday life, in an intimate and personal way.
I have visited New Orleans several times, mostly as a tourist and conference attendee, and once conducting research for a now-abandoned biography of the surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin (1905–1985).
Mise en Place
Codrescu’s central job is to acknowledge, but push back against, interpreting New Orleans as a series of myths that outsiders, including tourists, have and consume about the city. This includes the numerous spectacles they encounter, such as Mardi Gras excess, the New Orleans Saints football team (not to mention the frequent Super Bowl games held there), and jazz on Bourbon Street.
Codrescu’s counter-argument is embedded in his method. Having lived in the city for nearly two decades, he writes not as a visitor being entertained but as someone whose daily life is entangled with the city’s contradictions. The book’s thesis, never stated but consistently demonstrated, is that New Orleans can only be understood by living there and engaging with its people, customs, and events. This process enables Codrescu to move beyond the tourist gaze, which is typically superficial and superfluous.
This argument gains added weight because Codrescu is a kind of permanent outsider. He emigrated from Romania (Transilvania, no less), built his reputation partly through NPR commentary aimed at a national audience, and spent the bulk of his academic career at LSU rather than at a New Orleans institution. His insider status was earned rather than inherited, which gives him a particular vantage point: close enough to see what tourists miss, self-aware enough to know he is still reading the city rather than simply living inside it.
The Roux
The short-chapter format serves the book’s argument. The complexities of New Orleans are difficult to interpret, and Codrescu’s fragmented, episodic structure mimics the city’s own rhythm, which includes intense encounters followed by laid-back scenes. Because the chapters are largely self-contained, readers who find a particular vignette less engaging can skim and move on without losing the broader thread.
Étouffée
The best essays demonstrate Codrescu’s method at its sharpest. “Against Synchronicity” argues against the New Age tendency to read meaningful coincidence into New Orleans’s density of strange encounters. The city produces lots of bizarre juxtapositions, and pattern-seeking annoyingly prevails. One may not find his argument fully convincing, but it forces a genuine reckoning with how we interpret urban strangeness.
“Prosperity and the Devil” works through a deceptively simple anecdote: a neighbor repairing his house with old-fashioned tools inadvertently drives rats into surrounding homes. The essay uses this incident to explore the city’s paradox of maintenance and decay; the effort to restore one thing inevitably displaces damage elsewhere.
“Fried Rice” recounts the feud between novelist Anne Rice and Al Copeland, the founder of Popeyes. What makes the essay memorable is not the events, but what Codrescu draws from it: that in New Orleans, even cultural conflict gets refracted through food, property, and the specific grievances of adjacent neighbors.
The book’s longest chapter, “My City My Wilderness,” is its most ambitious. Codrescu moves through the city’s recurring themes, such as its unique food, crime, police corruption, and environmental vulnerability. Each theme is treated masterfully and in sufficient detail to give me the sense that I am experiencing the events myself.
The Gristle
The book’s recurring motifs, the humidity, local cuisine, topography, eccentric local personalities, and the figure of Baron Ludwig von Reizstein are occasionally redundant. Admittedly, this is a structural challenge when previously published essays are reprinted and brought together in collection form. What seems like texture across a couple of pieces can feel like repetition across sixty-six.
More substantively, Codrescu’s outsider-insider positioning, which is the book’s greatest strength, is also its quiet limitation. His New Orleans is densely populated with bohemians, academics, and the colorfully marginal. But readers should be aware that this is a very narrow demographic that pales against the city’s numerous working-class, immigrant, and poverty-stricken populations.
Café Brûlot
New Orleans, Mon Amour succeeds most when it resists the temptation to present the city in totally familiar ways. Codrescu’s best essays work the way good urban ethnography works. He is patient and attentive to the visual and sensory qualities of people, places, and things. His book is a useful reminder that there is always far more to the city than most visitors ever see—and that seeing more requires staying longer than most of us do.
The next time I visit New Orleans, I may try to visit some of the bars and restaurants Codrescu frequented. His book is a useful reminder that there is always far more to the city than most visitors ever see and experience, and that this requires staying longer, being more patient and aware than most of us usually are.