Author to speak at UW-Green Bay about supermax prisons
Sharon Shalev, internationally known author of Supermax, Controlling Risk Through Solitary Confinement, will speak on the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay campus at 3 p.m. Wednesday, April 20, in the Christie Theatre located in the University Union. Shalev will speak out against supermax prisons and their impact on society. This event is free and open to the public.
Shalev’s book, Supermax, examines the rise and spread of supermax prisons in the United States, which are dedicated to holding prisoners in prolonged and strict solitary confinement. Shalev had unique access to two supermax prisons and conducted in-depth interviews with prison officials, prison architects, current and former prisoners, mental health professionals, legal and human rights experts.
Shalev is a human rights worker and a criminologist. She earned her first degree in political science and international affairs at Tel Aviv University and later took a post with the human rights organization Israeli-Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights.
Shalev studied international human rights and humanitarian law at Essex University. In 1998, she joined the London School of Economics where she completed a Ph.D. thesis on supermax prisons in the United States. Currently, Shalev is a research fellow at Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the London School of Economics.
This lecture is part of the International Visiting Scholars Program, a joint initiative between UW-Green Bay and St. Norbert College. The purpose of the program is to bring well-qualified professionals from other countries to lecture and teach on the two campuses and to provide educational benefits to the citizens of Green Bay and surrounding communities. The overall objective is to improve international understanding by providing opportunities to learn from visiting scholars and for them to learn from us.
The lecture at UW-Green Bay is also part of the Historical Perspectives Lecture Series. First organized in 1985, the annual series by the UW-Green Bay Center for History and Social Change features a wide variety of historians and social scientists.
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