Professor Heather Ann Thompson is University of Michigan Professor of History & Afro-American and African Studies and one of country’s foremost mass incarceration scholars. She is a historian, author, activist, college professor and speaker from Detroit, Michigan. Heather won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). 

Heather writes about the history and current crises of mass incarceration for numerous popular and scholarly publications. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Jacobin, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Salon, Huffington Post, and Dissent. She has also appeared on NBC, NPR, Sirius Radio and various television news programs in the U.S. and abroad. Heather has written extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal legal system. Her award-winning scholarly articles include: “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in the Postwar United States,” Journal of American History (December 2010) and “Rethinking Working Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Labor: Studies in the Working Class History of the Americas (Fall, 2011). More information about Heather’s work can be found in her faculty profile and at https://www.heatherannthompson.com/.

On the policy front, Heather served on a National Academy of Sciences’ blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. The two-year, $1.5 million project was sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. 

Heather is a member of PLAN’s Advisory Board. She dedicated her time and insights to aid the development of analysis generated by PLAN’s COVID-19 Campaign and consulted with the PLAN Law Clerk who analyzed COVID-19 prison policies in Michigan. Heather presented at PLAN’s 2020 Continuing Legal Education Program, where she discussed her piece in The Washington Post entitled, “The Policy Mistakes from the 1990s that Have Made COVID-19 Worse.” 

Heather has extensive expertise in the areas of prison policy and prisoners’ rights and the intersections of incarceration, racism and inequality. She also brings to the JLL team considerable experience with the design and implementation of innovative knowledge bases and instructional tools. For instance, Heather was appointed as a Consulting Scholar for the Humanities Action Lab’s nationally traveling, multi-platform public humanities project on the history and human experience of incarceration. Heather’s background with pioneering knowledge delivery platforms helps the Jailhouse Law Library achieve its objective of redressing inequities. With Heather’s assistance, the JLL does so by affording prisoners meaningful access to the legal information they need to exercise their rights under the law using a purpose-designed online interface and diverse distribution nodes.