Workshop on Punishment and Social Control: Guest Lecture by Mary Ellen Stitt, Rutgers University

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The Workshop on Punishment and Social Control is a new interdisciplinary research community at UMass Amherst that is open to scholars across the Five Colleges. The workshop brings together faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and other researchers studying policing, courts, jails, prisons, and related systems of punishment and social control. We meet monthly during the academic year to workshop in-progress research — working papers, book proposals, book or dissertation chapters, and funding applications — and to host invited speakers. 

The second guest speaker in the series will be Mary Ellen Stitt, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University - New Brunswick. She studies the state's governance of mental illness and substance use. Her book Trial by Treatment: Punishing Illness in an Age of Criminal Legal Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2025) draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, surveys, administrative data, and other sources to document the unexpected impacts of treatment-based alternatives to traditional criminal punishment. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Punishment & Society, Social Forces, and Social Problems and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network, and Arnold Ventures, among others. It has received awards from the American Sociological Association's Sections on Crime, Law, and Deviance; Medical Sociology; the Sociology of Law; and the Sociology of Mental Health. 

The workshop's format is deliberately non-hierarchical: everyone gives and receives feedback as peers.offers a supportive space to share in-progress research—working papers, book proposals, grant applications, and early-stage ideas. Whether punishment and social control are at the center of your research or your work approaches these questions from another angle, you are welcome to RSVP for this series.

All workshops are 10-11:30 AM and generally scheduled on the second Friday of the month. Free parking passes are available to non-UMass attendees. Please umass [dot] punishmentworkshop [at] gmail [dot] com (email) 48 hours in advance to request a pass.