Christian Parenti is an American investigative journalist, academic, and author.
Early life and education
Parenti is the son of Michael Parenti and Susan Parenti. He attended Buxton School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, The New School for Social Research, and the London School of Economics, where he earned a PhD in Sociology and Geography.
Career
His books include Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (2000), a survey of the rise of the prison-industrial complex from the Nixon through the Reagan Era and into the present, and The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror (2003), a study of surveillance and control in modern society. The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2004), is an account of the US occupation of Iraq. In Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011), Parenti argues that climate change is the cause of social and political unrest. Parenti has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, the Ivory Coast and China, among other locations. Parenti subsequently taught sustainable development at the SIT Graduate Institute from 2012 to 2014. Since 2017, he has been teaching at John Jay College, where he is Professor of Economics.