Joanne DeCaro 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. Joanne 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 5 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.
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.