Directors: Brandon M. Terry and Elizabeth Hinton

The Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety, directed by Brandon M. Terry, The John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard and Elizabeth Hinton, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and Professor of Law at Yale Law School, is an interdisciplinary and multi-university initiative that seeks to advance our understanding of the ideals, systems, and practices that inform our criminal legal system and public safety initiatives in and outside of the state. The guiding approach of the institute is that questions of criminal legal punishment and policing are best investigated with rigorous empirical study alongside attention to ethical questions of systemic justice and legitimate dissent, as well as historical and interpretive questions about the emergence of various practices of incarceration, punishment, policing, and crime. It is only at the intersection of many disciplinary approaches that we can think beyond our habitual answers to the problems of justice and public safety, and think anew about what practices or ideals might be available to our political imagination. The institute aims to conduct pathbreaking empirical, historical, and normative research, produce scholarship that is accessible and collaborative, and foster productive public debate about the issues most pressing for communities disproportionately affected by the burdens of mass incarceration, social and economic marginalization, and violence.