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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.
Should You Earn a PhD in Criminology/Criminal Justice or an Allied Field?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossSomewhere deep inside of you, or at the back of your mind, a voice calls out, urging you to pursue a Ph.D. in Criminology/ Criminal Justice (CJ). Perhaps you like to binge on late-night TV shows featuring handsome, charismatic police officers and drop-dead gorgeous and brilliant detectives solving complex crimes. Or maybe your passion for […]
Lights, Camera, Corrections
/by Jeffrey Ian RossMany films have been made about convicts, prisons, or set in American correctional facilities. On the one hand you have documentaries that provide a history of a particular correctional facility, a longstanding challenge, an incident or series of incidents (like a riot), the death penalty, and some of the solutions that have been attempted. On […]
Taking stock of the scholarly study of graffiti and street art
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThe streets, utility poles, and back alleys of large urban centers in most big cities are epicenters for all manner of graffiti and street art. Predictably this activity engenders lots of responses. Notwithstanding the longstanding desire by property owners, ghost buffers, and moral entrepreneurs to deter this activity and remove this work from the surfaces […]