- Department:
- Criminal Justice
- Campus:
- IU Bloomington
Bonnie Ernst is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Indiana University. She is a historian of gender, race, and punishment in the United States. Her first book, Challenging Confinement: Mass Incarceration and the Fight for Equality in Women’s Prisons (NYU Press, 2023), analyzes how twentieth-century women’s movements sparked protest, organizing, and reform that was led by incarcerated women and coalitions of attorneys and activists. Her current research examines how Black women became ensnared in convict leasing and contested unjust punishment practices in southern states. Ernst’s scholarship emphasizes the perspectives of incarcerated people and the legacies of racial oppression and gendered harm in the criminal legal system.