Dr. Geoff Ward is Associate Professor of the Departments of Criminology, Law & Society and Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He studied sociology at Hampton University (B.A., 1994) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D., 2001) and has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, and a visiting scholar in African-American Studies at Columbia University. In 2006 he was a co-recipient of the National Institute of Justice's W.E.B. Du Bois Fellowship to support research on racial balance in representation among federal court authorities and its relation to parity in sentencing. His work combines historical and sociological methods to examine the racial politics of social control, with emphasis on the racial history of juvenile justice, juvenile and federal courts, social movements, and racial group representation in justice-related occupations. His publications appear in various academic journals and anthologies. He is the author of The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and American Juvenile Justice (2012), a study of the rise, fall and lasting remnants of Jim Crow juvenile justice (University of Chicago Press).