Baz Dreisinger

ABOUT

In the US, mass incarceration has come to be recognized as the civil rights issue of our time: a tremendous movement taking on systemic racism, inequality and injustice.

But prisons are also a global crisis, locking up 11 million people worldwide—3 million of them legally innocent, merely awaiting trial—and damaging families and communities across the globe.

What does this crisis look like, and what is the United States’ role in it, historically and today? Why are prisons—from the US to South Africa, Brazil to Australia—overwhelmingly dominated by people of color? How did it come to be that societies everywhere equate justice with prison? Are prison and punishment the only way to create safe communities, and is punishment morally right? 

As a global justice worker, educator, community organizer, author, filmmaker and Global Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Baz Dreisinger tackles these profound questions in a global context.

Beginning in Africa and ending in Europe, Dr. Dreisinger’s acclaimed 2016 book Incarceration Nations—hailed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, C-Span, NPR and many more—is a first-person odyssey through the prison systems of the world, looking into the human stories of incarcerated men and women and those who imprison them. A jarring, poignant view of a world to which most are denied access and a rethinking of one of America’s most far-reaching global exports—the modern prison complex—the book has been translated and published in China, Taiwan, Japan and Italy.

The book also launched a movement—literally. While serving as a Fulbright Global Scholar in 2018 to Rwanda, South Africa and Chile, Dr. Dreisinger launched Incarceration Nations Network (INN), the first-ever global network that supports, instigates and popularizes innovative prison reform and justice reimagining efforts around the world. With 118 partners in more than four dozen countries, INN fuses the local and the global to amplify innovative justice work, build transnational solidarity, stage attention-grabbing global events and consult with governments looking to rethink their approaches to justice.

Based in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, Dr. Dreisinger in 2011 founded the college’s groundbreaking Prison-to-College Pipeline program, which offers college courses and reentry planning to incarcerated men throughout New York State, and broadly works to increase access to higher education for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals. The P2CP has been hailed as game-changing in profiles on PBS and Al Jazeera and given laudatory coverage in two prominent cover stories in the New York Times. Dr. Dreisinger has been teaching inside prisons two decades.

As a journalist and critic, Dr. Dreisinger has written about race-related issues, global culture, music and pop culture for such outlets as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and ForbesLife, among many others; she also produces on-air segments about music and world culture for National Public Radio (NPR). Dr. Dreisinger earned her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, where she specialized in African-American studies and critical race theory. Her first book Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture, a cultural history of whites who pass as black, was featured in the New York Times Book Review and on National Public Radio and CNN.

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