Paula Ioanide, an associate professor who specializes in comparative race and ethnicity studies, is available to speak about President Barack Obama’s call for reform in the criminal justice system. Ioanide is a vocal activist against the expansion of prisons in the United States who favors alternatives to incarceration such as childhood education programs, affordable and safe housing, and living wages.
On Tuesday, July 14, during an N.A.A.C.P. convention in Philadelphia, Obama called for alternative programs that would help reduce crime among youth, a bill that would reduce or eliminate mandatory minimum prison sentences for low-level offenses, and for a review of the use of solitary confinement.
Ioanide is a professor in the Center for the Study of Race, Culture, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College. Her research examines the social and spiritual wounds caused by mass incarceration and militarized policing, anti-immigrant discrimination, and increased poverty resulting from neoliberal policy shifts.
Recently she was a member of the Coalition to Stop the Tompkins County Jail Expansion, which led a months-long fight against a seven-bed expansion in Ithaca, New York and renewed the call for alternatives to incarceration. Ioanide was a member of the Jail Alternatives Task Force convened by the Tompkins County Legislature in response to community resistance. She also volunteers with the Cornell University Prison Education Program. Ioanide is the author of the just-published book “The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness,” which was named one of 10 Must-Read Academic Book For 2015 by Flavorwire. Ioanide can be at [email protected].
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