Beyond Prisons: A Conversation with Justice Practitioner Fellow Jimmy Soto and Professor Reuben Jonathan Miller

Join the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and our latest initiative, Beyond Prisons, for a conversation with newly appointed Justice Practitioner Fellow James “Jimmy” Soto. Learn more about Jimmy’s activism and his work as a legal advocate for incarcerated individuals while behind bars, and his amazing work on the outside since he won his freedom last December. Jimmy will be in conversation with Professor Reuben Miller, author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration.

Wed, April 17, 5:30pm Doors open with a reception. 6pm Program begins.

Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, Community Room

5733 S. University Ave.

Food will be served.

Beyond Prisons is a teaching and learning initiative which interrogates, disrupts, and works toward moving beyond carceral logics and systems. The Justice Practitioner Fellowship is designed to advance practices, knowledge, and skills for fellowship recipients as well as broaden engagement for Beyond Prisons programming on campus and beyond.

James “Jimmy” Soto: Exonerated after 42 long years of incarceration, Jimmy Soto is a human rights advocate and CSRPC’s 2024 Beyond Prisons Justice Practitioner Fellow. Jimmy hit the ground running when he walked out of prison just before Christmas in 2023. While incarcerated he earned his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University’s Prison Education Program (NPEP) and was an active member of the Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project’s (P+NAP) Think Tank which explores long-term sentencing practices in Illinois and nationally and is supported, in part, by CSRPC’s Beyond Prisons initiative. Jimmy is a paralegal with Northwestern Law School’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic and a research assistant with the Epistemic Reparations Global Working Group at Northwestern University. He is planning to go to law school next year.

Reuben Jonathan Miller, PhD: Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity. Miller is also a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. He was named a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Miller’s first book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration is based on 15 years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated men, women, their families, partners, and friends in Chicago, Detroit, and a number of cities across the United States. He is currently conducting research on the “moral worlds” of people we’ve deemed violent and a comparative study of punishment and social welfare policy in port cities that were most involved in the transatlantic slave trade.