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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.
A message to our students: If you are thinking about sitting out the fall semester, please reconsider
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThe clock is ticking and maybe you are too late? But still there may be some time to make a better informed decision. Like most undergraduate and graduate students, and some of their parents who are footing the bill, you have weighed the pros and cons of going back to classes this fall. You are […]
Portlandia Redux: How using uninvited federal LEOs to police public protest will backfire
/by Jeffrey Ian RossPortlandia, a satirical television series, makes fun of Portland’s often eccentric hipster community. It is fiction. But the deployment of heavily armed federal law enforcement officers (LEOs), coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security, many without organizational identification and dressed in military fatigues, is not. Though allegedly dispatched to protect federal property such as monuments […]
The time to act to stop the spread of COVID-19 in our nations’ correctional facilities is now
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThe United States now has the highest number of people who have contracted COVID-19, and the greatest number who have died as a result of it. But the distribution of people who have been affected is not even. Some people and settings are more vulnerable than others. Since the United States has the highest incarceration […]