Joanne Belknap
Department of Ethnic Studies
College of Arts & Sciences

Joanne Belknap, received a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Michigan State University in 1986. She is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado and is a past President of the American Society of Criminology. She is primarily interested in the trajectory of trauma to offending and prisoner/jail inmate reentry from incarceration to society, and has numerous scholarly publications. Dr. Belknap is currently working on the fifth edition of her book, The Invisible Woman: Gender, Crime, and Justice. She has secured almost two million dollars in grant money to conduct research victimization, offending, and incarceration. She has served on state advisory boards for female offenders and women in prison, on U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno’s Violence Against Women Committee, gave expert testimony to the Warren Christopher Commission investigating the Rodney King police brutality incident in Los Angeles, and served as a pro bono advisor on criminal justice policy for the Obama presidential campaign. Dr. Belknap has won numerous research, teaching and service awards. Her current passion is  teaching a CU-B course in a men’s prison in “Camp George West,” listed in the National Register of Historic Places, where half of the students are Inside (prisoner) and the other half are Outisde (CU-B undergraduate) students.  Here’s an article about one of her Inside-Out Prison Exchange courses: https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2019/05/06/prison-education-social-justice-inside-out