Beth E. Richie, Ph.D.

Beth E. Richie, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Black Studies and the Inaugural Chair in Social Sciences and the Humanities at The University of Illinois at Chicago. The emphasis of her scholarly and activist work has been on the ways that race/ethnicity and social position affect the experience of violence and criminalization, focusing on the experiences of Black women and gender non-conforming people.

Dr. Richie is the co- author of Abolition. Feminism. Now. with Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, and Erica Meiners. published earlier this year. She is also the author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation (2012) which chronicles the evolution of the contemporary anti-violence movement during the time of mass incarceration in the United States. She has authored numerous articles concerning Black feminism and gender violence, abolition, race and criminal justice policy, and the social dynamics around issues of criminalization, state violence and grassroots organizing responses. She is one of the editors of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom (2018) with collaborating teachers from Stateville Correctional Center. Her earlier book, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Black Battered Women, was pivotal framing the current work to free criminalized survivors from carceral systems.

Dr. Richie’s work has been supported by grants from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and The National Institute for Justice and The National Institute of Corrections. She has been awarded the Audre Lorde Legacy Award from the Union Institute, The W.E.B. DuBois Award from the Western Society of Criminology, the 2020 Distinguished Career Award from the American Sociology Association, the Advocacy Award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the UIC Woman of the Year Award.

Dr. Richie was a founding board member of The Institute on Domestic Violence in the African Community, The National Network for Women in Prison, a founding member of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, and a founding collaborator and advisor to the Violence Intervention Project in New York City.

In 2013 she was awarded an Honorary Degree from the City University of New York Law School and in 2014 she was appointed as a Senior Advisor to the National Football League to work on their gender violence prevention program. She is a member of the 2022 cohort of the Annie E. Casey Foundation Freedom Scholars.