A Hunter sociology professor’s book has won an award from a criminal-justice nonprofit.
Michaela Soyer’s book The Price of Freedom: Criminalization and the Management of Outsiders in Germany and the United States received the 2025 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ Outstanding Book Award.
Drawing on interviews with young men in American and German prisons, The Price of Freedom shows how both countries have constructed a racialized underclass of outsiders. The Germans do a better job of reforming and reintroducing offenders into society.
Soyer argues that American criminal-justice reformers need to think beyond European systems as a model, however. The Europeans’ conformist, welfare-state societies differ too much from our individualistic nation with its punitive bent and weak social-welfare structures.
“Building a more humane system of punishment is a complex undertaking in a country as vast and diverse as the United States – especially when reforming the criminal-justice system has to go hand in hand with expanding social services,” Soyer writes.
Soyer will receive the award at the ACJS conference on March 14, 2025.
Soyer received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Justice Center for Research at Penn State University.
Her work focuses on delinquency, incarceration, and social theory. She is working on a new research project about a forgotten victim group of the Third Reich, so-called career criminals, and their continued marginalization in German society.
Soyer’s work has been supported by the Humboldt Foundation, The Gerda Henkel Foundation, The National Institute of Justice, The National Institute of Health, and the National Science Foundation,
About the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences
ACJS is an international association established in 1963 to foster professional and scholarly activities in criminal justice. It promotes education, research, and policy analysis among professionals in the criminal-justice system and students seeking to explore criminal justice as future scholars or practitioners.
