SJC Projects & Publications
Somewhere like home: Formerly incarcerated americans' quest for belonging
Janani Umamaheswar
Against the backdrop of ongoing initiatives that threaten to weaken the most vulnerable Americans, Somewhere Like Home asks an urgent and profound question: Where do formerly incarcerated Americans feel they belong? Through 44 in-depth interviews conducted in the immediate weeks and months following President Trump's reelection in 2024, I complicate portrayals of formerly incarcerated people as socially alienated, politically apathetic, and uniformly lonely. Extending theoretical research on punishment and citizenship, I show that formerly incarcerated Americans’ sense of belonging is messy, contradictory, inconsistent, and complicated, but it is not absent—even when it seems like it should be. For these Americans, family signifies both comfort and turmoil; neighborhoods are spaces of conflict as well as collectivity; prison represents both trauma and kinship; post-incarceration freedom is tantalizing and oppressive in equal parts; and America is a source of both pride and resentment. This book is ultimately a testament to the resilience of formerly incarcerated Americans who endlessly forge and reforge ideas about what it means to “belong” to a family, community, and nation in the face of seemingly insurmountable disadvantage.
American Injustice: Race and Wrongful Convictions from Scottsboro to Central Park
Robert J. Norris
More than 3,700 people in the United States have been exonerated since 1989 after experiencing wrongful conviction. While the racial and gender dynamics in these cases are often mentioned, they remain relatively understudied. In American Injustice, I aim to place these issues in their broader sociopolitical and historical context. With an analytical framework anchored in the American tradition of localized, politicized justice and the racialized and gendered stereotypes of crime that have permeated American culture, I am conducting a series of case studies of Black men who were wrongly convicted of violence against white victims.
The "Scottsboro Boys" | 1931
Innocence research has traditionally focused on a common set of contributing factors and the aftermath of exoneration. A result of this narrow lens is that researchers typically frame wrongful convictions as primarily involving innocent defendants and the state actors who harmed them, glossing over the roles played by the many other actors who may be involved in these cases. Further, scholars rarely analyze the timing and sequencing of the criminal legal processes that generate wrongful convictions and exoneration, instead often conflating the two. In this article, we first present a framework that captures the shifting and multifaceted roles of actors who are neither representatives of the state nor the innocent people most directly harmed in wrongful conviction cases. We then apply this framework to (re)analyze the Central Park Jogger case.
Robert J. Norris, Janani Umamaheswar, and Clayton B. Drummond
Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune, an American prison newspaper published in the 1960s and 1970s, we highlight how incarcerated artists used satirical humor to convey the harms of imprisonment and express their agency in the face of penal oppression. In so doing, we draw attention to the importance of visual data, which go beyond traditional narrative and numeric data by capturing the imaginations of people in prison.
Arden Richards-Karamarkovich, Janani Umamaheswar, and Robert J. Norris
Selected Recent & Affiliate Publications
2026
Robert J. Norris, Janani Umamaheswar, and Clayton B. Drummond. "Expanding Wrongful Conviction Analyses: A Framework to Foreground Temporality and Change." Crime, Law, and Social Change 84(11).
2025
Andrew J. Madrigal and Robert J. Norris. "Stuck in Limbo: "Freedom" Under the Shadow of a Wrongful Conviction." Virginia Journal of Criminal Law 10: 51-75.
Arden Richards-Karamarkovich and Janani Umamaheswar. "Narrative resilience among formerly incarcerated mothers." Feminist Criminology 19(1): 59-78.
Mary Catlin, Talley Bettens, Kyle C. Scherr, and Allison D. Redlich. "Lived experiences of bias in compensation and reintegration associated with false admissions of guilt." Law and Human Behavior 48(5-6), 486-502.
Talley Bettens. The risks and consequences of innocence in school discipline: Implications for policy and research. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 30(3) 260-272.
Talley Bettens, Amye R. Warren, and Emily Pica. "Stigma or support? How gender, race, and intersectionality impact perceptions of exonerees." Women & Criminal Justice. Advance online publication.
Andrew J. Madrigal and Robert J. Norris. "Stuck in limbo: "Freedom" under the shadow of a wrongful conviction." Virginia Journal of Criminal Law 10: 51-75.
Arden Richards-Karamarkovich and Janani Umamaheswar. "Narrative resilience among formerly incarcerated mothers." Feminist Criminology 19(1): 59-78.
Charlotte Gill, David Weisburd, and Madeline K. McPherson. "Beyond the police: Community-led partnerships for meaningful crime prevention and social justice."
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 714(1): 150-168.
Charlotte Gill, David Weisburd, Denise Nazaire, Heather Prince, and Claudia Gross Shader. "Building “A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth” through problem‐oriented community organizing: A quasi‐experimental evaluation." Criminology & Public Policy 23(2): 287-325.
Mary Catlin, Talley Bettens, Kyle C. Scherr, and Allison D. Redlich. "Lived experiences of bias in compensation and reintegration associated with false admissions of guilt." Law and Human Behavior 48(5-6): 486-502.
Talley Bettens. The risks and consequences of innocence in school discipline: Implications for policy and research. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 30(3) 260-272.
Talley Bettens, Amye R. Warren, and Emily Pica. "Stigma or support? How gender, race, and intersectionality impact perceptions of exonerees." Women & Criminal Justice. Advance online publication.
2024
Janani Umamaheswar. "Wrongful conviction as racialized cumulative disadvantage." The British Journal of Criminology 63(3): 537-552.
2023
2022
Andrew J. Madrigal and Robert J. Norris, "The Good, the Bad, and the Uncertain: Wrongful Convictions, State Harm, and the Aftermath of Exoneration." Critical Criminology 30: 321-342.