2025 Barrock Lecture: Prisons, Punishment, and Correctional Officers

Tuesday, May 13, 2025 - 5:00pm • Lubar Center

Please join us for the 2025 Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law: Prisons, Punishment, and Correctional Officers, delivered by Sharon Dolovich, professor of law at UCLA and director of the UCLA Prison Law & Policy Program

• Tuesday, May 13, 2025
• 5:00 to 6:00 p.m., Lecture 
• Marquette Law School, Ray and Kay Eckstein Hall, Lubar Center

The event is complimentary, but registration is required HERE. This event may be counted as 1 CLE credit.

The experience of the incarcerated is undeniably central to any adequate understanding of the carceral project. At the same time, another sizeable population is also directly affected by the American enthusiasm for locking people up: correctional officers. Whatever one thinks of the particular shape imprisonment takes in the United States, the nation today has more than 6,100 prisons, jails, and detention centers. Yet surprisingly little attention is paid to the toll working in prison takes on the approximately 350,000 men and women we rely on to make these institutions function.

This lecture will highlight some of the many ways working inside prisons negatively impacts the physical and mental health of correctional officers—and, by extension, their families and communities. It will also consider how expanding the lens to include the many harms experienced by correctional officers might help change and enlarge our collective critical picture of the prison and the use of incarceration as punishment.

This lecture series remembers George Barrock, L’31, and Margaret Barrock.

Contact: Christine Wilczynski-Vogel, Associate Dean for External Relations