Robert Chase is a historian of prisons, policing, and punishment. His research and teaching interests include the history of mass incarceration and the construction of what historians call "the carceral state." He is an expert in social justice, Latino/a, and civil rights movements, and political and African American history. His forthcoming book reexamines the prisoners’ rights movement of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and the subsequent construction of what many historians now call the era of mass incarceration.