Philip Goodman

Phil Goodman

Title/Position
Associate Professor & Chair
Sociology

Philip Goodman received his PhD in 2010 from the University of California, Irvine in Criminology, Law and Society. Earlier that same year, he started as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. In 2017, he received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor. Between 2018 and 2020, Goodman served as Associate Chair of the Criminology, Law & Society undergraduate program at UTM. In July 2020, he began a three-year term as Sociology department Chair.

Goodman uses prisons and punishment—and crime and law, more generally—as lenses through which to consider questions of race, inequality, penal politics, labour, rehabilitation, and the micro-dynamics of everyday life. At the heart of his scholarship is an attempt to ask how and why punishment changes over time, why it varies across place, how it produces inequality, and how it is experienced today. In 2017, he published Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press) with Joshua Page and Michelle Phelps, theorizing penal change in the United States. His articles have been published in a variety of journals, including American Journal of Sociology; Social Problems; British Journal of Criminology; Theoretical Criminology; Law & Social Inquiry; Law & Society Review; and the Canadian Review of Sociology.

At the University of Toronto Mississauga, he has taught a wide variety of courses, including a second-year introduction to criminology and law, a second-year criminological theories course, and a fourth-year seminar based on the Walls to Bridges model held weekly inside a prison or jail (comprised of half UTM CLS majors and specialists, and half students who are incarcerated).

Education
Ph.D. (Criminology, Law & Society, University of California, Irvine)
M.A. (Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine)
B.A. (History, Bowdoin College, Maine)

Publications

Quinn, Kaitlyn and Philip Goodman. 2022. “Shaping the Road to Reentry: Organizational Variation and Narrative Labor in the Penal Voluntary Sector.” Punishment & Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221128102

Goodman, Philip. 2021. “Conclusion.” In Labor and Punishment: Work In and Out of Prison, edited by Erin Hatton. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Goodman, Philip. 2020. “‘Work Your Story’: Selective, Voluntary Disclosure, Stigma Management, and Narratives of Seeking Employment After Prison.” Law & Social Inquiry 45(4):1113-1141. https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2020.9

Page, Joshua, Michelle Phelps, and Philip Goodman. 2019. “Consensus in the Penal Field? Revisiting Breaking the Pendulum.” Law and Social Inquiry 44(3):822-827. https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2019.35

Page, Joshua and Philip Goodman. 2018. “Creative Disruption: Edward Bunker, Carceral Habitus, and the Criminological Value of Fiction.” Theoretical Criminology 24(2):222-240. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480618769866

Dawe, Meghan and Philip Goodman. 2017. “Conservative Politics, Sacred Cows, and Sacrificial Lambs: The (Mis)Use of Evidence in Canada’s Political and Penal Fields.” Canadian Review of Sociology 54(2):129-146. https://doi.org/10.1111/cars.12142

Goodman, Philip, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps. 2017Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Kang, Timothy, Candace Kruttschnitt, and Philip Goodman. 2017. “Multi-Method Synergy: Using the Life-History Calendar and Life as a Film for Retrospective Narratives.” The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 56(4):532-553. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12231

Goodman, Philip and Meghan Dawe. 2016. “Prisoners, Cows, and Abattoirs: The Closing of Canada’s Prison Farms as a Political Penal Drama.” British Journal of Criminology 56(4):793-812. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azv078

Goodman, Philip (lead author), Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps. 2015. “The Long Struggle: An Agonistic Perspective on Penal Development.” Theoretical Criminology 19(3):315-335. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480614547151

Goodman, Philip. 2014. “Race in California’s Prison Fire Camps for Men: Prison Politics, Space, and the Racialization of Everyday Life.” American Journal of Sociology 120(2):352-394. https://doi.org/10.1086/678303

Goodman, Philip. 2012. “‘Another Second Chance’: Rethinking Rehabilitation Through the Lens of California’s Prison Fire Camps.” Social Problems 59(4):437-458. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2012.59.4.437

Goodman, Philip. 2012. “Hero and Inmate: Work, Prisons, and Punishment in California’s Fire Camps.” Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society (Special issue Labor and the Political Economy of Punishment) 15(3):353-376. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-4580.2012.00398.x

Goodman, Philip. 2011. “From ‘Observation Dude’ to ‘An Observational Study’: Gaining Access and Conducting Research Inside a Paramilitary Organization.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 26(3):599-605. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjls.26.3.599

Goodman, Philip. 2008. “‘It's Just Black, White, or Hispanic’: An Observational Study of Racializing Moves in California's Segregated Prison Reception Centers.” Law & Society Review 42(4):735-770. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5893.2008.00357.x

Other

Specialization
Criminology, Law and Society