Erica Meiners is the Bernard J. Brommel Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, where she teaches in the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies, Education, and Justice Studies. She is the author of several books, including For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State, and has published and lectured widely on issues related to gender and incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and prison abolition. Meiners is also a co-founder of an alternative high school for formerly incarcerated men and women in Chicago, and is active locally on a range of efforts to challenge the carceral state.