Joanne DeCaro is a Ford Foundation and AAUW fellow, a founding member of the community archives PrisonPandemic and Mourning Our Losses, and she is a director at the non-profit Restorative Justice Fund. She is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She employs mixed-methods research, is a trained oral historian, and is completing a dissertation on lifers and the re-entry process in Southern California, based on 53 oral history interviews and years of ethnographic observation. She is also currently the co-lead on a project on end-of-life care in the California Department of Corrections. Joanne is a punishment and reentry scholar, who uses her past training in visual journalism and digital humanities to tell the narratives of the incarcerated using multimodal techniques, such as documentary shorts and digital archives.
Research Interests: trauma and incarceration, life and long-term sentences, aging and death in prison, moral injury and moral emotions, trauma-informed care, healing spaces, social and psychological aspects of reentry, and ethics of carceral research.