Eric
Seligman
Adjunct professor
Phone number
(914)815-3837
Room number
New Building 9.63.31
Education

M.A. in Economics, John Jay College/CUNY, May 2022

Ed.M., Harvard Graduate School of Education, May 2016

B.M., Northwestern University, December 2011

Bio

Eric Seligman is an adjunct professor of economics and labor studies at John Jay College and the School of Labor and Urban Studies. He currently performs research for John Jay Economics and Harvard Sociology. His work has focused on the political economy of prison labor and the treatment of mass incarceration as a labor market institution. With economics chair Geert Dhondt, he developed a study of the scale and content of prison labor in the U.S. over the course of the prison boom using the Bureau of Justice Statistics's Survey of Prison Inmates. Previously, he worked to expand access to college in and after prison, most recently for John Jay's Prison-to-College Pipeline.

Courses Taught

ECO-170 | Crime, Class, and Capitalism: the Economics of Justice

ECO-101 | Introduction to Economics and Global Capitalism

LABR-669 | Labor & Incarceration (graduate elective for CUNY's School of Labor and Urban Studies)

Scholarly Work
  • “Prison Labor and Idleness in U.S. State Prisons, 1974-2016” with Geert Dhondt, John Jay Economics Working Paper
  • "From Labor-discipline to Labor-segmentation: American Mass Incarceration as an Evolving Labor Market Institution" for John Jay Economics
  • “Social-Penal Divergence in the U.S. and Western Europe, 1890-1940” for Harvard Sociology (forthcoming)
  • “How Mass Incarceration Blocks Progress Towards Economic Justice” for Prison Policy Initiative (forthcoming)
  • Independent research for the American Civil Liberties Union's “Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers” (2022, citation 142)