about

Megan Comfort is a senior research sociologist in RTI’s Transformative Research Unit for Equity (TRUE) and affiliated faculty in the Division of Prevention Science at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work centers on understanding pathways to promote equity, justice, health, and wellbeing for people involved with the criminal legal system and their loved ones. Megan has been conducting research with people involved in the criminal legal system for over two decades and has extensive expertise in qualitative research methods including in-depth interviews, ethnography, and focus groups. She is strongly invested in mentoring early-career researchers, including first-generation college students, family members of incarcerated people, and scholars who have been involved with the criminal legal system. Megan is the author of Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and a co-author with RTI colleagues Tasseli McKay, Christine Lindquist, and Anupa Bir of Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry (University of California Press, in press). Her work has been published in Criminal Justice and Behavior, Ethnography, the Journal of Sex Research, Annual Review of Law & Social Science, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, PLoS ONE, and AIDS & Behavior, among other journals, and also has appeared in journals in Brazil, Argentina, France, and Portugal.

Megan began her career working for Centerforce, a non-profit organization that provides advocacy and support services for people who are incarcerated and their loved ones.  While at Centerforce, she was the Director of Women's Services at The House at San Quentin, a center located just outside the gates of San Quentin State Prison that provides child care, clothing exchange, and other services to anyone coming to visit people held in the prison.

As a sociology graduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Megan returned to San Quentin to conduct an ethnographic study of women visiting their partners for her dissertation research.  Her book based on this work, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (University of Chicago Press, 2008), analyzes the “secondary prisonization” of women in relationships with incarcerated men.  

From 2002-2011, Megan conducted research funded by the National Institutes of Health with colleagues at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), first as a research specialist (2002-2007) and then as an Assistant Professor (2007-2011).  In collaboration with Olga Grinstead Reznick and others, she designed, implemented, and evaluated the first HIV-prevention program specifically for women with male partners who were incarcerated.  Megan continues to have an affiliated faculty appointment with UCSF's Department of Medicine, and is a member of the UCSF Aging Research in Criminal Justice Health (ARCH) network.

In 2011, Megan joined RTI International.  She believes in strengthening the policy and programmatic relevance of research, and is a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.  In line with her commitment to social justice, she is an advisory board member for Essie Justice Group, a non-profit organization that aims to empower women with incarcerated loved ones and end mass incarceration.  She also serves on the advisory board of UnCommon Law, a non-profit organization that provides high-quality legal representation, advocacy, and support for people serving life sentences so that they can safely return to their communities.