John Irwin

John Irwin (1929-2010) was an American criminologist who served five years in Soledad Prison for armed robbery before earning his doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968 and teaching criminology at San Francisco State University for twenty seven years. In 1967 he founded Project Rebound, a program helping formerly incarcerated people attend college, and he became a founding figure of the convict criminology movement, which argued that people with direct experience of imprisonment could contribute essential firsthand knowledge to the academic study of prisons. His books, including The Felon, The Jail, The Warehouse Prison and his final work Lifers: Seeking Redemption in Prison, drew on both his own experience and his research to examine the everyday reality of incarceration from the perspective of the imprisoned.