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About
Criminologist, Scholar, & Consultant
Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D., is a criminologist at the University of Baltimore and co-founder of Convict Criminology. His approach is shaped by nearly a decade of work before entering academia, as a courier, cab driver, corrections worker, and union shop steward. It is further grounded in three decades of visiting correctional facilities across North America, Europe, and South America, researching the conditions inside them, and having conversations with convicts and correctional officers and administrators. It also draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated people outside those facilities, and on ethnographic fieldwork on street culture and on graffiti and street art internationally. Ross has published more than thirty books and shares his expertise on corrections, policing, political crime, street culture, and graffiti and street art through scholarship, public writing, speaking, media commentary, and consulting.
INTRODUCTION TO CONVICT CRIMINOLOGY Now Available in Portuguese
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThe Portuguese edition of Introduction to Convict Criminology (2024) comes as Brazil’s prison population is climbing again after a COVID-era dip. Published as Introdução à Criminologia dos Condenados by @editoradplacido, the book brings Convict Criminology to a growing Portuguese-speaking audience at a time when Brazil’s prison system faces enormous challenges. There is a relatively small […]
Street Culture, Book by Book
/by Jeffrey Ian RossSearch Amazon using the term street culture, and you’ll find countless books about gangs, graffiti, street art, policing, homelessness, drug markets, skateboarding, street fashion, or urban crime, but relatively few that explicitly examine street culture as an overarching concept. Why is that? Part of the reason is that researchers tend to study one aspect of […]
Trash Collectors
/by Jeffrey Ian RossDuring the late 1970s, I got my start driving cab for Beck Taxi in Toronto. Their business at the time was disproportionately located in the east end, above and below the Danforth. We got calls from the projects in Regent Park and the low-income housing at Main and Gerrard, but most business came from working-class […]