David Knight

David J. Knight is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University, where he is also part of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. A political sociologist of the carceral state, David investigates how communities experience mass incarceration and mobilize in response to it. This research agenda sits at the intersection of Black studies and the social sciences, and it spans several cross-disciplinary fields ranging from carceral studies and social movements to public policy and health.

David’s published work showcases these themes. Using data ranging from in-depth interviews to large-scale experiments, he has detailed the “carceral passages” that Black boys and men traverse as they come of age while enduring long sentences in prison (American Journal of Sociology) as well as the long-term consequences of housing vouchers and residential mobility on the voter participation of largely Black women and Latina heads of household (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). David is also quite interested in expanding the reparations debate among social scientists to consider reparations for the harms of the carceral state, namely, reparations for survivors of police torture. Here, he led in theorizing how those most vulnerable continue to be marginalized amidst movement efforts to enact reparations at the local level (RSF Journal of the Social Sciences). This research sheds light on the underrecognized effects of incarceration on lived experiences and subjective understandings of coming of age in Black communities, and they reveal the unintended consequences of processes and policies that are meant to ameliorate or redress historical injustices by illustrating how those very policies reproduce barriers in Black communities’ access to political power.

Most importantly, David is a proponent of rethinking the U.S. carceral state (its past, present, and future) by studying the emergence and effects of Black political mobilization. This includes documenting the embodied nature of threat that motivates incarcerated people to mobilize (American Sociological Review), as well as inviting social scientists to consider how dominant narratives of U.S. policing of Black communities are changed when “bottom-up” data and community-based knowledge sources are used—sources that reveal repeated yet often neglected movement histories in which local Black communities seek to secure safety and address harm in the context of state-sanctioned and state-condoned harm (Annual Review of Criminology). 

Currently, David is principal investigator of two major projects. The first project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is a multi-state study of the rise of local health equity interventions following the 2020 protests against police violence and mass criminalization. The second project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, establishes the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab (Movements Lab), a multiplatform lab and human rights documentation project that uses archival and survey methods to explore the politically contested nature of the prison state.

David earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago.

Recent Publications

“Contesting the State: Embodied Threat and the Emergence of Prisoner Mobilization.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 90, Issue 4, August 2025, pp. 1-32.

“Black Political Mobilization and the U.S. Carceral State: How Tracing Community Struggles for Safety Transforms the Policing Narrative.” Co-authored with Vesla Weaver. Annual Review of Criminology, Vol. 8, January 2025, pp. 25-52.

“Residential mobility and persistently depressed voting among disadvantaged adults in a large housing experiment.” Co-authored with Baobao Zhang. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 121, no. 20, May 2024, e2306287121.

“Carceral Passages: Coming of Age in Prison America.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 184, no. 5, March 2024, pp. 1359-1408.