Gender and Women's Studies

Professor Dewey’s research and teaching focus on the intersections between violence and poverty in women’s and men’s criminal justice system involvement, an area in which she has an established record of academic, professional, and collaborative leadership at the community, state, federal, and international levels. Reaching beyond disciplinary confines, her research results have shaped policy and practice through eleven books and over one hundred papers, including substantive reports for UN Women, the US Census Bureau, Planned Parenthood, the Correctional Education Association, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the Wyoming Department of Corrections. Her work has also received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Microsoft Philanthropies, and numerous other entities. Results of these projects have featured in national media outlets such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, PBS, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and The Nation.

Professor Dewey is working on three projects derived from extensive research in over one hundred prisons and jails. The first, “Higher Education in Prison: A Pilot Study of Approaches and Modes of Delivery in U.S. Prison Administrations,” assesses non-uniformed prison staff members’ and administrators’ perspectives on how prison administrators and educators collect and utilize particular types of evidence to guide decision-making about the types of education and psychosocial programming prisoners receive. The second, Wyoming Pathways from Prison (WPfP), is a free college-in-prison program with an ongoing action research component that Dewey co-founded and continues to lead in conjunction with the Wyoming Department of Corrections; over 10% of Wyoming prisoners have received college credit as a result of WPfP’s work (see http://www.uwyo.edu/wpfp). The third project, tentatively titled Throwing Time: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Prison America, utilizes literary nonfiction, particularly short stories and ethnographic vignettes, derived from Dewey’s extensive work in prisons and jails across the United States as a means to elucidate the slippery essence of incarceration and the human spirit.

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