Just announced! Dr. Benjamin Justice will be a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar for 2023-2024 academic year.

The Rutgers Graduate School of Education (GSE) is pleased to announce that Dr. Benjamin Justice, Professor of Education and Director of the Education Ph.D Program, was selected by The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) as a Visiting Scholar for the 2023-2024 Academic Year. While in residence at RSF in New York City, visiting scholars pursue research and writing projects which reflect the foundations’s commitment to strengthening the social sciences and conducting research to “improve social and living conditions in the United States.”

Dr. Justice’s research agenda has focused on ways that state authorities, institutions, and other actors facilitate the development of civic identity. Over the last decade, his work has examined the current crisis in American criminal justice and its negative effects on American civic life, including the assertion of white supremacy in the guise of justice.

During this residency, Dr. Justice and his colleague and co-author Tracey L. Meares (Walton Hale Hamilton Professor and Founding Director of The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School) will write a book on how American criminal justice creates citizens. In particular they focus on how legally innocent people experience, and are shaped by, three core aspects of criminal legal processing: policing, pre-trial detention, and adjudication.

“In an era of unprecedented massification, criminal legal processing constitutes a vast system of civic education, framing people as citizens and anti-citizens through distinct “curricula” of experience. I am incredibly pleased and honored that the Russell Sage Foundation has selected our project, underscoring the importance of this line of inquiry.

Congratulations Dr. Justice on this well-deserved acknowledgement of your work!