Joanne DeCaro is a punishment and reentry scholar, who uses her past training in visual journalism and digital humanities to tell the narratives of the incarcerated using multimodal techniques. Joanne is a founding member of the community archivesPrisonPandemic, Mourning Our Losses, andLifer Records. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She employs mixed-methods research and is a trained oral historian. Her dissertation on lifers and the re-entry process in Southern California was based on 53 oral history interviews and 5 years of ethnographic observation with hundreds of participants. She is also currently the co-lead on a project on end-of-life care in the California Department of Corrections and a pilot study on a CBT intervention for parolees with adjustment disorders. Her research interests include trauma and incarceration, life and long-term sentences, aging and death in prison, moral injury and moral emotions, trauma-informed care, social and psychological aspects of reentry, and ethics of carceral research.
