UNE Center for Global Humanities presents “From Bernie Madoff to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: The 'Worst of the Worst' and U.S. Criminal Justice Policy”

Despite his death earlier this month, Bernie Madoff and the financial crimes he committed still loom large in the American psyche, as does the incarcerated Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who orchestrated the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Despite the appropriately harsh media treatment and lengthy prison sentences these classic villains received, however, using ‘worst of the worst’ examples like them to set criminal justice policy ultimately prevents large-scale change to the vast social problem of over-incarceration.

So will argue scholar Colleen Eren in an online lecture hosted by the University of New England Center for Global Humanities when she presents “From Bernie Madoff to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: The 'Worst of the Worst' and U.S. Criminal Justice Policy” on Monday, April 26 at 6 p.m.

Eren will draw from her 2017 book “Bernie Madoff and the Crisis” and from a new book she is currently writing that investigates criminal justice reform from a social movement perspective. Her lecture will discuss the ways in which the Madoff case became a way the public could discuss and punish not only the crime of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but the unethical behavior that led to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It will explain the perils of using a single case to remedy more systemic problems, including those found in U.S. capitalism. 

Eren is an associate professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at William Paterson University and Program Director of its Criminology and Criminal Justice program. She maintains an active and varied scholarship with a focus on financial crime as well as on social movements in criminal justice. She also has a background in community organizing having spent more than five years as director of organizing at New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, which led a successful statewide campaign to keep capital punishment out of New York. She was also a steering committee member of Amnesty’s Program to Abolish the Death Penalty. She is currently a member of the board for New Hour for Women and Children, a nonprofit which helps justice-impacted women returning home from prison and jail.

This will be the fourth and final online lecture of the Spring 2021 season for the Center for Global Humanities. Lectures at the Center are always free, open to the public, and streamed live online. For more information and to watch the event, please visit: https://www.une.edu/events/2021/bernie-madoff-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-worst-worst-and-us-criminal-justice-policy