At the onset of the pandemic, Michele drafted this rapid response paper detailing strategies that sheriffs could implement in order to prevent and respond to the spread of COVID-19 in jails.

In preparation for the conference ―Opening Up a Closed World: What Constitutes Effective Prison Oversight?,‖ held at the University of Texas in 2006, graduate students in my seminar on ―Prisons and Human Rights‖ embarked on a major group effort to compile and review the literature dealing with independent oversight of prisons and to develop an annotated bibliography of this material.

This Foreword to a comprehensive volume on prison oversight identifies themes emerging from a major national conference on oversight and summarizes each article in the collection.