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About
Criminologist, Scholar, & Consultant
Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D., is a criminologist at the University of Baltimore and co-founder of Convict Criminology. His approach is shaped by nearly a decade of work before entering academia, as a courier, cab driver, corrections worker, and union shop steward. It is further grounded in three decades of visiting correctional facilities across North America, Europe, and South America, researching the conditions inside them, and having conversations with convicts and correctional officers and administrators. It also draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated people outside those facilities, and on ethnographic fieldwork on street culture and on graffiti and street art internationally. Ross has published more than thirty books and shares his expertise on corrections, policing, political crime, street culture, and graffiti and street art through scholarship, public writing, speaking, media commentary, and consulting.
Small but consequential victories: Convict Criminology becomes an official division of the American Society of Criminology
/by Jeffrey Ian RossNobody goes into academia to become rich and famous. Working in this particular career we hopefully make small, but important contributions. A paper that you worked really hard on finally gets published, your first book gets released, a student that you worked closely with graduates and gets hired by a good employer, etc. These activities […]
Crime, criminal justice agencies, & crimes of the powerful during COVID-19
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThe global COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the types and amount of crime as well as the ability of criminal justice agencies in advanced industrialized countries to deal with crime. In the United States and other similar countries, people are spending more time at home, which may not have been a safe place before the […]
Why is street culture important?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossStreet Culture is defined as the beliefs, dispositions, ideologies, informal rules, practices, styles, symbols, and values associated with, adopted by, and engaged in by individuals and organizations that spend a disproportionate amount of time on the streets of large urban centers (Ross, 2018, p. 8). When interpreted in this manner, street culture is not simply […]