Vera Institute of Justice

Jacob Kang-Brown is a senior research fellow with Vera’s Beyond Jails initiative, exploring the use of incarceration across the United States. At Vera, Jacob has conducted research on school discipline, status offense reform, policing and crime rates, hate crime, language access, jail and prison populations, charging and sentencing practices, electronic monitoring, and solitary confinement in prisons.

Before working at Vera, Jacob worked for the County of Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations. His writing has appeared in the Lancet Public Health, the New York Review of Books, Contexts, SSM-Population Health, the Atlantic, Dissent, USA Today, and American Jails magazine.

Jacob holds a BA in sociology with an emphasis in urban studies from Wheaton College, as well as an MA in social ecology and a PhD in criminology, law, and society with an emphasis in critical theory from the University of California, Irvine.