Adaner Usmani is Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Studies, effective July 1, 2025. His research is driven by some simple questions about the distribution of flourishing and suffering in modern societies. He is also interested in the fraught relationship between our normative commitments and our empirical work. Most of his ongoing work is on American mass incarceration. With John Clegg, he is working on a book in which we seek to explain American punishment by studying it in comparative and historical context. The book is based on a multi-year effort to collect comparative and historical data on prisons, policing, penal spending and related series. With Chris Lewis, he is working on a book explaining what is wrong with mass incarceration if the standard story of its origins is false.