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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.
Parking, power, and externalities
/by Jeffrey Ian RossIt’s a simple fact of life. People need and want to get places, and unless they walk everywhere, we need somewhere to temporarily or permanently store the objects that they use to assist them getting to their destinations. Some of those items (e.g., bicycles, hover boards, razors, roller blades, and skateboards) are relatively easy to […]
Why preferring individual social science disciplines is a bad practice: Two cheers for interdisciplinary approaches
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThe social science fields, more specifically the academic departments in which they are located, the ones I know best, are funky beasts. Although there is a demand for scholars who work in a specific area to do interesting research, there is also often a blind loyalty to hiring candidates who have graduated in the social […]
Be mindful of the “lived experience fallacy” and its cousin, “those who are closest to the problem are in the best position to change it”
/by Jeffrey Ian RossOccasionally I hear and see the comment (also known as approach, axiom, principle, and statement), often in activist circles, that although somebody may be considered an expert on a subject (e.g., poverty, discrimination, criminal victimization, etc.), because they don’t have lived (or direct) experience of something (e.g., a problem, situation, series of events, persons, etc.), […]