The Jailer’s Reckoning
AVAILABLE NOW
How Mass Incarceration Is Damaging America
Serving time behind bars is now a normalized social experience—it affects a majority of Americans directly or indirectly. There is a clear price, the jailer’s reckoning, to be paid for this—a society with declining levels of civic cohesion, reduced economic prospects, and less political engagement. In this landmark book, Kevin B. Smith explains how the United States became the world’s biggest jailer, what it has done to the country, and what we can do about it now.
Explore Dr. Smith’s work.
I am a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies political psychology and public policy. I am interested in why people come to have different political attitudes and orientations, and how those differences drive choices and actions. As a policy scholar I am particularly interested in the states, in how experimentation within these “laboratories of democracy” helps shed light on what are – and what are not – effective approaches to dealing with important social problems.
Current Research:
My current research is focused on three broad areas:
The impact of political engagement and attention on psychological, social, and physical well-being.
The moral psychology of ideology and partisanship
Mass incarceration