Philip Goodman

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).