Melanie’s research focuses on the policies and institutions of urban criminal justice systems in the United States since the 1950s. She is currently working on a book that is tentatively titled Cook County Jail: Racism, Violence, and the Dangerous History of Jail Reform. Looking to one of America’s largest jails, she explores how contests over reform, human rights, and race came to constitute everyday experiences of state violence among marginalized people in American cities. Melanie is also interested in histories of money bail; the focus of her second book project, Making Bail: Race, Poverty, and Awaiting Trial in the United States is how criminal courts and bail bondsmen developed legal technologies to set the price of freedom for people accused of crimes in the modern US.
