Vera Institute of Justice

Ben was a senior program associate and American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Vera’s New Orleans office. He worked on efforts to reduce the jail population and focused on bail reform. He researched the history of the commercial bail system in Louisiana and across the South, and developing multimedia engagement strategies. His written and video work has appeared in a variety of venues including Prison Photography, Archive Journal, The International Review of Social History, Journal of the Oxford University History Society, Routledge, ArcGIS Online, PBS Learning Media, and Medium.com.

Ben received his PhD in history from Harvard, where he spent six years researching and writing about the history of domestic and overseas U.S. prisons, his masters in education from Brown, and a bachelors in history and politics from Oberlin College. Before joining Vera New Orleans, Ben served as co-director of Louisiana’s contribution to the States of Incarceration national public history project. He volunteers as board president at BAR NONE, an arts-based restorative justice nonprofit, and with the Friends of Travis Hill School in New Orleans’ Juvenile Jail.