Where are you from, where did you go to school?
I grew up in Bangor, Maine and did my undergraduate work at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I did my graduate work at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. If you haven't had the pleasure of visiting New Jersey yet, don't worry. You're not missing much.
What are you writing your dissertation on?
For my dissertation, I'm studying the relationship between prisons and the local government in two rural communities that lobbied for prisons as an economic development strategy. I spent a year and a half living in Beeville, Texas and Florence Colorado interviewing prison officials, governmental officials and community residents. Beeville has three Texas state prisons and Florence has four federal facilities including the federal supermax prison where the federal government holds its most dangerous inmates, including the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski and the men that carried out the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Richard Reid, the man who tried to light a shoe bomb on a plane in 2001 is also there. All told, I spent time in 19 different prisons in Colorado and Texas, a fact that makes my family very proud.
What are you teaching this semester, and what kind of topics are you going to focus on?
I'm teaching Law and Society, Constitutional Law and Introduction to US Politics. In Constitutional law, we will be looking at the principles, power and politics of Constitutional law with a focus on the relationship between law and politics. In Law and Society, we will begin by looking at historical and international notions of justice and its application and will then focus on law and justice in the United States context. The readings for this course are a mix of novels, memoirs, journalistic accounts, court cases and philosophic works. In Introduction to US Politics, we will study the formal and informal institutions that make up the American political system and then see how these institutions interact by looking at some of the issues that are most important today.
So, is it true that your students will go to prison?
I think everyone should have to go to prison at some point in their college career, so I think this is a good opportunity to do so with the near guarantee of being let out at the end of the day! I'm setting up a tour of the old federal facility and current state facility on McNeil Island which will include a visit to the segregation unit, commonly known as the "hole," meetings with corrections officers and small group meetings with inmates there.
What do you do when you're not working?
My main hobby is hiking and I spend as much time as I can in the mountains.
In sum: students, you'd be crazy not to take a course from Professor Williams while you have the chance. If you have questions or want to know more, you'll find him in Professor Haltom's office, Wyatt 219
