Dr. Calvin John Smiley, Ph.D.

CalvinJohn Smiley, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department of Hunter College-City University of New York. As a critical sociologist, his work focuses on issues related to race, inequality, and social justice and has published in various academic peer-reviewed journals and book chapters.

He is the co-editor of Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Coming Home (Routledge, 2020) with Keesha M. Middlemass, which is the first comprehensive work that looks at reentry through a critical lens. Further, he is the author of Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023), which examines how individuals returning to society navigate and negotiate this process with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas. In the end, this book advocates for abolition praxis to put reentry out of business.

Smiley has research and teaching interests in race and ethnic relations; law, society and justice; critical criminology; penology and reentry; urban sociology; and qualitative methods. Beyond this, his research has been cited in notable publications such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Toronto Star, and Le Monde.

Finally, Smiley has worked to abolition the death penalty, volunteers at Rikers Island and Horizon Juvenile Center facilitating restorative justice programming, and serves as the president of the board of trustees for New Jersey Association on Corrections (NJAC). In the end, he is invested in alternatives-to-incarceration and abolition praxis.

For more information on Dr. Smiley’s work, click here for his CV.