CSLS Speaker Series – “Bounding Knowledge: The Role of Correctional Experts in Prison Reform Litigation”

Featuring Keramet Reiter, Professor of Criminology and Law & Society, UC Irvine

In this paper, I analyze a corpus of dueling expert reports filed in ten separate class action cases challenging the constitutionality of solitary confinement conditions in prisons in the United States and Canada over the last ten years. Civil rights lawyers initiated the first such case, Ashker v. Governor of California, in 2013, on behalf of a class of 500 prisoners, who had been in long-term solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison in northern California for ten years or more, continuously. In Ashker and subsequent cases, both academic criminologists and corrections professionals have played, through the vehicle of expert reports and testimony, surprising roles in shaping not just solitary confinement litigation, but prison reform litigation more broadly. I argue that regressive (nominally resisting reform) academic experts perpetually repackage and reinforce rehabilitative ideals, while progressive (nominally supporting reform) correctional experts play a legitimizing, but constraining, role in reform. More broadly, regressive academic experts and progressive correctional experts, together, re-shape how knowledge about prison is both produced and understood, through critiques of both research methods and ethics. This contributes to a literature on expertise conflicts in socio-legal studies, complicating narratives about expertise ecosystems developed in the policing context, and describing and analyzing a new expertise ecosystem in prison policy and litigation.

Cosponsored with the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

Reception: Lunch 12:15-12:45p.m. in the Kadish Library
Program: 12:45-2:00p.m. in the Philip Selznick Seminar Room

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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) to fully participate in this event, please contact csls@law.berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.