Peter Moskos was born in Chicago, graduated from Evanston Township High School, and lives in Astoria, Queens. He has worked as an usher, waiter, cook, bartender, theater technician, boat captain, and police officer. Cop in the Hood (Princeton University Press, 2008), Moskos’s first book, examines the war on the drugs from a first-hand perspective. It focuses on urban crime-prevention and police-specific variables linking drug laws to high-levels of African-American violence and imprisonment. While enrolled as a Harvard University graduate student, Moskos worked as a Baltimore City police officer from 1999 to 2001 patrolling the midnight shift in Baltimore’s high-crime Eastern District. As a police officer, Moskos saw both the damage caused by the illegal drug trade and the futility of an arrest-based solution to the drug problem. Although the damage from drug use can be real and severe, drug prohibition is worse.Moskos is currently working on police-related research projects.