"Racial Disparities in the American Prison Population"

Gregory Huber, Yale University, and Marc Meredith, University of Pennsylvania, are giving a public lecture on racial disparities in the American prison population on Tuesday, Mary 24, 2016 at 4:30pm in Rockefeller 003.  Please see below for each of their full biographies.  This lecture is part of the 2016 Annual Workshop of the Program in Quantitative Social Science entitled "Policing, Incarceration, and Politics," and is co-sponored by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center.  Please see the full schedule here.

Lecture Description:

The U.S. Bureau of Justice estimates that on any given day, more than 2 million people are incarcerated in the United States. Mass incarceration affects many facets of American society, but its consequences are concentrated on racial and ethnic minority communities. This talk will document the scope and disparate impact of incarceration, highlight the ways in which incarceration is only the tip of the iceberg for how the criminal justice system affects citizens, and examine the likely efficacy and political feasibility of proposed reforms to help reduce the scope of incarceration and the disparities in its application.

Speaker Bio:

Gregory Huber is Professor, Department of Political Science and Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies Behavioral Research Lab, Yale University. His teaching focuses on American politics, encompassing topics in both political institutions and behavior. At the undergraduate level, subjects include courts and the criminal justice system, bureaucracy and public administration, domestic political economy, and political behavior. At the graduate level, his teaching has focused on training in the conduct of research (Research and Writing, required for all second-year PhD students) as well as on the creation of three new courses in core areas of American Politics: (1) Political Preferences and American Political Behavior, (2) Collective Action and Choice, and (3) Political Institutions. Prof. Huber also serves as the Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. He earned his BA and MA in Political Science from Emory University and his PhD in Politics from Princeton University.

Marc Meredith joined the Political Science Department at University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor of political science in 2009.  He holds a BA in Economics and Mathematical Methods in the Social Science from Northwestern University, a MA in Economics from Northwestern University, a MA in Political Science from Stanford University, and a PhD in Political Economics from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Marc was a visiting lecturer of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Business and Public Policy Group in the Wharton School.  

Marc’s research examines the political economy of American elections, with a particular focus on the application of causal inference methods.  His substantive research interests include election administration, local political institutions, political campaigns, and voter decision-making, particularly as it relatives to economic conditions.  Marc’s research appears in Economics and Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Political Analysis, and the Quarterly Journal of Political Science.  He teaches classes on business and politics, state and local government, and statistical methods.