Current Research > CAPS Faculty and Staff > Megan L. Comfort, PhD Assistant Professor

Megan L. Comfort, PhD
Assistant Professor

Megan Comfort is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at UCSF and a visiting fellow at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  She received her PhD in Sociology from LSE in 2003 and was awarded the Robert McKenzie Prize for her dissertation.  She began working at CAPS in 2002 as a Research Specialist and was appointed Assistant Professor in 2007.

Dr. Comfort has a longstanding interest in and commitment to exploring how incarceration affects inmates’ relationships with their family members and loved ones.  From 1995-1997 she worked for Centerforce (a community-based organization serving prisoners and their families) and the Marin AIDS Project providing health education and other services to women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison.  For her doctoral research in 2000, Dr. Comfort conducted ethnographic field work in the visitor waiting area at the prison and in-depth interviews with women with incarcerated husbands, fiancés, or boyfriends.  Her book based on this research, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (University of Chicago Press, 2008) analyzes how the incarceration of a partner results in the “secondary prisonization” of women as the correctional facility infiltrates and transforms their personal, domestic and social worlds.  In 2002 she joined CAPS as a co-investigator and Project Director for an NINR-funded study of women visiting their incarcerated partners at a northern Californian state prison for men (see: The HOME Project).

Currently Dr. Comfort is the Principal Investigator of an NIMH-funded study of HIV risk among male-female couples recruited in Oakland, California following the male partner’s release from prison (see HIV Risk Among Male Parolees and Their Female Partners).  Dr. Comfort also is a CAPS Methods Core Scientist with expertise in ethnographic methods, qualitative interviewing, and conducting research with vulnerable populations.  In addition to her book, Dr. Comfort’s publications include articles in Criminal Justice and Behavior, Ethnography, Journal of Sex Research, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and American Journal of Public Health.

Research interests

HIV prevention, HIV risk behaviors, behavioral interventions, incarceration, parole, women, couples, people of color, health disparities, poverty, qualitative methods, ethnography

Current research

Education

  • 2003, PhD (Sociology), Robert McKenzie Prize, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

  • 1999, MPhil (Sociology), London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

  • 1998, MSc (Criminology), honors of Distinction, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

  • 1992, BA (Black Studies), magna cum laude, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

Publications

Books

  • Comfort M.  Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. The University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Articles

  • Comfort M, Grinstead O, Faigeles B, Zack B. Reducing HIV Risk Among Women Visiting Their Incarcerated Male Partners. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 2000; 27(1): 57-71.

  • Comfort M. ‘Papa’s House’: The Prison as Domestic and Social Satellite. Ethnography, 2002; 3(4): 467-499.  Brazilian translation printed as ‘A casa do papai’: A prisão como satélite doméstico e social. Discursos Sediciosos: Crime, Direito, e Sociedade, 2003; 8(13).

  • Comfort M. In the Tube at San Quentin: The ‘Secondary Prisonization’ of Women Visiting Inmates. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 2003; 32(1): 77-107.

  • Comfort M, Grinstead O. The Carceral Limb of the Public Body: Jail Detainees, Prisoners, and Infectious Disease. Journal of the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care, 2004; 3(2)April/June: 45-48.

  • Comfort M, Grinstead O, McCartney K, Bourgois P, Knight K.  ‘You Can’t Do Nothin’ in This Damn Place’: Sex and Intimacy Among Couples with an Incarcerated Male Partner.  Journal of Sex Research, 2005; 42(1): 3-12.

  • Grinstead O, Faigeles B, Comfort M, Seal D, Nealey-Moore J, Belcher L, Morrow K. HIV, STD, and Hepatitis Risk to Primary Female Partners of Men Being Released from Prison.  Women and Health, 2005; 41(2): 63-80.

  • Comfort M.  ‘C’est plein de mecs bien en taule!’: Incarcération de masse aux États-Unis et ambivalence des épouses. (‘It’s a Lot of Good Men Behind Walls!’: Mass Incarceration in the United States and the Ambivalence of Partners.)  Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 2007; 169: 22-47.

  • Comfort M.  Punishment Beyond the Legal Offender.  Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2007, 3: 271-96.

  • Comfort M. ‘Partilhamos tudo o que podemos’: A dualização do corpo recluso nos romances através das grades. (‘We Share Everything We Can the Best Way We Can’: Romance Across Prison Walls and the Dualization of the Convict Body.) Análise Social, 2007; XLII (185): 1055-1079.

  • Grinstead O, Comfort M, McCartney K, Koester K, Neilands T. Bringing it HOME: Design and Implementation of an HIV/STD Intervention for Women Visiting Incarcerated Men. AIDS Education and Prevention, 2008; 20(4): 285-300.

  • Weiser SD, Neilands TB, Comfort ML, Dilworth S, Cohen J, Tulsky JP, Riley ED. Correlates of incarceration vary by sex among homeless and marginally housed individuals in San Francisco. American Journal of Public Health, in press.

    Chapters
    Comfort M.  Inside and Out: Incarceration, HIV/AIDS, and Public Health in the United States. HIV/AIDS: Global Frontiers in Prevention/Intervention, Cynthia Pope, Renée T. White, and Robert Malow (eds). Routledge, 2008.

    Comfort M. ‘The Best Seven Years I Could’a Done’: The Reconstruction of Imprisonment as Rehabilitation by Former Prisoners and Their Partners. Imaginary Penalties, Pat Carlen (ed.), Willan Publishing, in press.

Contact

Center for AIDS Prevention Studies
UCSF Box 0886
50 Beale St., Suite 1300
San Francisco , CA 94105
Voice: (415) 597-4961
Fax: (415) 597-9213
Email: Megan.Comfort@ucsf.edu