The Unwritten Rules of Policing in South Africa and the United States

As an Open Society Fellow, Jonny Steinberg wrote Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City (Jonathan Cape, 2011) about a Liberian diaspora community in a Staten Island housing project and the memories of civil war they carried with them to New York. The book narrates a history of the war as seen through the eyes of those fighting out its aftermath in a foreign country.

 Steinberg currently works as a senior researcher at the Institute for the Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, and is writing a book on the role of fear in shaping South African statecraft, past and present. His previous books look at everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy. Two of them, Midlands (Jonathan Ball, 2002), about the murder of a white farmer, and The Number (Jonathan Ball, 2004), about crime and punishment in Cape Town’s ghettos, won South Africa’s premier nonfiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize.

Steinberg has written extensively on South Africa’s criminal justice system for the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg. He has a doctorate in political theory from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Herb Sturz is a senior adviser at the Open Society Institute. He is founding chairman of The After-School Corporation and served as founding director of the Vera Institute of Justice. Sturz has served New York City as deputy mayor for criminal justice and chairman of the New York City Planning Commission. 

He received a BA from the University of Wisconsin and an MA from Columbia University, and is a recipient of a Rockefeller Public Service Award.

Stephen Hubbell is senior public affairs officer for the Open Society Fellowship Program. He consults closely with fellows to develop media strategies to broaden public awareness of their work and to integrate fellows into the global Open Society community. 

Hubbell joined the Open Society Foundations after 20 years as a journalist and editor. He has worked as a senior editor at Metropolitan Books and at Harper's, where he edited the work of many notable writers, including Anne Fadiman, Harold Brodkey, Elliott Currie, Marilynne Robinson, Alan Weisman, Arlie Hochschild, and Edward Fox. He has also served as Middle East correspondent for The Nation, for whom he covered the first Gulf War and the rise of political Islam.

He received his bachelor's degree in government from Wesleyan University.