Vera Institute of Justice

Tony Platt is a distinguished affiliated scholar at the Center for the Study of Law & Society, University of California, Berkeley. A criminologist and sociologist, Platt has published 12 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of criminal justice, race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He has taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State Universities.

Drawing upon his most recent book Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States (St. Martin’s Press, 2019), Platt discusses how various criminal justice reforms have expanded rather than reduced the net of social control. He argues that the decisive shift to the right under the Trump administration makes it an urgent necessity to articulate a strategic vision of structural reform and social justice—one that alleviates suffering, improves people’s everyday lives, and profoundly changes the assumptions and governance of criminal justice. To do this requires us to build upon a long history of progressive reform and radical activism, but also to develop new ways of thinking, a revitalized imagination, and reckoning with a historical legacy that weighs heavily on the present.