Lecture: Prison Boom in Rural Towns @ UTSA Downtown

The UTSA Department of Demography, housed in the College of Public Policy, will host a lecture by sociologist John Eason on the economic consequences of the rural prison development boom at noon on Thursday, Feb. 12 in Frio Street Building Room 1.402 at the UTSA Downtown Campus. The event, presented as part of the department’s annual lecture series, is free and open to the public.

Eason is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Texas A&M University. His areas of interest include crime, race, rural sociology, sociology of punishment and urban sociology.

His research links race, punishment and spatial inequality to community processes and the political economy. Centering on the emergence of the rural ghetto, Eason has forged a new conceptual model of neighborhood disadvantage across rural and urban spaces.

Eason received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He earned the Rural Sociological Society’s 2012 Young Scholar Award while teaching at the School Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. He also served as a political organizer, most notably for then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama. To learn more about Dr. John Eason, you can visit his website www.johneason.com

The Demography Lecture Series brings academics and practitioners of the social sciences to UTSA to speak about topics including human population, social trends and innovations in the field.

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The UTSA Department of Demography provides training to increase students’ understanding of the size, distribution, composition and growth of human populations. For more information, visit copp.utsa.edu/department/about-us_dem.

For more information about the lecture, visit copp.utsa.edu or contact the UTSA Department of Demography at 210-458-3163.