Keramet Reiter

Examines how people in prison get labeled as gang members and how that label, along with race, affects who ends up in solitary confinement and for how long. Finds that once someone is tagged as gang-involved, they are much more likely to be placed in isolation and kept there longer, with harsher effects for some racial groups even when behavior is similar.

Examines how prison staff decide who gets placed in solitary confinement and how those decisions are influenced by factors like behavior labels and institutional practices. Finds that classification systems can strongly shape who ends up in restrictive housing, sometimes leading to inconsistent or overly harsh use of isolation depending on how people are labeled. 
 

Draws upon 140 in-depth interviews with gun offenders detained in Los Angeles County jails to examine legal and extra-legal factors that influence illegal gun possession. Findings suggest that feelings of insecurity coupled with perceptions of, and experiences with, law enforcement interact in complex ways to condition legitimacy-based beliefs, and ultimately, compliance.

Draws on interviews with 76 prisoners, 47 prison staff, and 14 experts, to document lived experiences of punishment in the Danish prison context. Argues that, regardless of “humanizing” elements of normalization and humanity, prisoners and staff may experience the power of the carceral state in Denmark in ways similar to those under more obviously harsh confinement regimes, as exist in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in the United Kingdom.

Demonstrates how penal technologies that violate current sensibilities can survive, despite changing macro‐level social factors that otherwise explain penal change and practice, provided those technologies serve prison officials' internal goals.

Draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Identifies common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-labels immigrants (as deportable noncitizens) and supermax prisons (as dangerous gang offenders).

Tells the history of an original "supermax," California's Pelican Bay State Prison, where extreme conditions sparked statewide hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013—the latter involving nearly 30,000 prisoners. Reiter describes how the Pelican Bay prison was created—with literally no legislative oversight—as a panicked response to the perceived rise of black radicalism in California prisons in the 1970s.