Amanda Lewis

Research Associate, Adjunct Lecturer

Dr. Amanda Lewis is a research associate for Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative and an adjunct lecturer in Sociology for Georgetown University. She works directly with incarcerated individuals as a professor and program facilitator for PJI’s Bachelor of Liberal Arts and Prison Scholars programs. Additionally, she is largely involved in the admissions and advising processes for all our educational programs, and she has an active role in researching and advising for PJI’s Making and Exoneree program. Beyond these roles, she is the acting project manager for a large-scale quantitative research project, The Reckoning Project, which examines and exposes official misconduct by legal actors such as prosecutors, police, and judges.

Amanda received her PhD from the University of Florida in Criminology, Law, and Society in 2021. She also has a M.A. in Criminology, Law, and Society and a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina where she double majored in Psychology and Philosophy. As a researcher, she focuses on topics including prevention, rehabilitation, mental, emotional and behavioral outcomes among juveniles and young adults, consequences of prisonization, reentry, psychology and law, and wrongful conviction. She utilizes both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in her research. Her doctoral dissertation was qualitative in nature and consisted of interviews with 35 primary and secondary exonerees. Here, she examined the total impact a wrongful conviction has on exonerees and their closest loved ones.