Colleen P. Eren's "Reform Nation"

Colleen P. Eren is Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at William Paterson University. She is the author of Bernie Madoff and the Crisis (2017) and co-author (with Robert Costello) of The Impact of Supreme Court Decisions on U.S. Institutions (2021).

Eren applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration, and reported the following:

Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration takes that federal criminal justice bill passed during the Trump presidency, and uses it as a case study through which to understand the social movement dynamics operating in the national criminal justice reform movement over the past twenty-five years. Even though the First Step Act was not a revolutionary bill, it was symbolic of the movement's newfound power and its evolution, to where it consisted of powerful, sometimes "strange bedfellow" actors from the advocacy space on the right and left, of billionaire philanthropists, celebrities, and politicians, while also consisting of those most affected by the criminal justice system: directly impacted and formerly incarcerated people. This national movement entered the mainstream, and as it did, larger questions began to be raised about the influence of elites in that movement, how much it was being led by those affected by the criminal justice system, what the goals should be, and the very nature of democratic participation in political change in the United States.

Page 99 of my book, then, serves well to illustrate both the central themes of the book, and also an example of how we see those themes play out through specific groups within the criminal justice reform movement: celebrities. The first paragraph raises broad questions:

Identity-linked concerns about which celebrities--if any--can or should be a messenger for criminal justice reform; how representative they are of those impacted by the criminal justice system; how much presence celebrities should give; what their message should be; and for what objectives they should advocate are questions the movement grappled with at the start of the 2020s. After all, who speaks for a newly nationalized yet generally disaggregated movement battling for federal, state, and local change in multiple institutions, and actors having varying political ideologies leading to very different end objectives?

The rest of the page discusses the involvement of celebrity Kim Kardashian in the criminal justice reform movement, where she played a role in getting Donald Trump to grant clemency to a grandmother who was incarcerated for a first-time, non violent drug offense, as well as the First Step Act. It also then presents the tensions within the movement that come from such involvement, quoting formerly incarcerated activist Adnan Khan: "We're tired of celebrities trying to be our 'voice.' We don't need you to be our voice. We're out here. All the celebs are not centering or learning from the leadership of people who are formerly incarcerated."

Indeed, then, page 99 of Reform Nation gives you a 'teaser' of the overall theme and specific concerns of my book.

Learn more about Reform Nation at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue