Thompson earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the
University of Michigan and completed her PhD at
Princeton University. Thompson was a faculty member at the
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, from 1997 to 2009, and then was a faculty member of
Temple University in
Philadelphia from 2009 to 2015. In 2015, Thompson returned to the Detroit-area when she and her husband accepted faculty positions at the University of Michigan. Thompson writes about the history and current crises of
mass incarceration for numerous publications. Her work has been featured in
The New York Times,
Newsweek,
The Washington Post,
Jacobin,
NBC,
Time,
The Atlantic,
Salon,
Huffington Post, and
Dissent. She has also appeared on
NPR,
Sirius Radio, and various television news programs in the U.S. and abroad. Several of Thompson's scholarly pieces, including "Why Mass Incarceration Matters", have won best article awards, and her popular piece in
The Atlantic, "How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America", was named a finalist for the Best Media Award given by the
National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Thompson was a
Soros justice fellow. In 2015, Thompson co-founded the Carceral State Project and Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative at the University or Michigan. She has been on the board of numerous organizations, and was a member of the standing Committee in Law and Justice at the National Academies. She served on a
National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel to study causes and consequences of
incarceration in the U.S. Thompson's books include:
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Rebellion of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon Books, August 2016);
Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (2001, new edition 2017); and the edited collection,
Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s. She is now completing two new books: the first is a comprehensive history of the Bernhard Goetz Subway Vigilante shootings of 1984 and the second is a long history of the 1985 Philadelphia police of MOVE.
The Attica uprising of 1971 The culmination of more than a decade of research,
Blood in the Water offers the first definitive account of the 1971
Attica Prison riot. The book was released in August 2016 to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of the country's largest prison rebellion. The book sheds new light on the riot, the state's violent response, and the decades-long implications of Attica for those involved as well as
America's criminal justice system. Thompson's research for the book included interviews with former Attica prisoners, hostages, families of victims, lawyers, judges, law enforcement, and state officials, as well as significant amount of material never before released to the public.
Blood in the Water was winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2017. Thompson also served as the lead historical consultant for the documentary
Attica, released by
Showtime in 2021.
History of Detroit and the present-day motor city Thompson's 2001 book,
Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City is a regularly cited account of the
history of Detroit during the tumultuous
1960s and 1970s. It is a comprehensive account of police brutality against marginalized groups, and the black political reaction to it in this period, as well as the underlying reasons for why Detroit became such a crucial site of black political activism and black political power after 1973. The book was published by
Cornell University Press and a new edition was published in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of the
Detroit riot of 1967. This updated edition addresses issues currently facing Detroit as well as the city's recent
bankruptcy and the current challenges the city faces thanks to record
rates of incarceration. ==Publications==