Berger is the author of Prison: Incarceration and the Making of America, which will be published by Basic Books on March 9, 2027.

His most recent book is Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey, which earned a starred review from Library Journal and was short-listed for the MAAH Stone Book Prize. The book tells the globe-spanning story of Black Power in the 20th century through the lives of unheralded grassroots organizers Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons. 

His previous books include Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, which won the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians; Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001, co-edited with Emily Hobson; and Rethinking the American Prison Movement, co-authored with Toussaint Losier. 

A public scholar, Berger directs the Washington Prison History Project, a multimedia archive of prisoner activism and policy. His writing for public media has appeared in Boston Review, Dissent, Inquest, Jewish Currents, TIME, Truthout, and the Washington Post, among elsewhere, and he has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. He serves on the advisory board of the American Prison Newspaper Project, which digitized prisoner-produced publications throughout US history, and the editorial board of the Justice, Power, and Politics book series at UNC Press. In 2011, he co-founded the Philadelphia-based grassroots coalition Decarcerate PA. Currently, he serves on the board of Washington’s Look2Justice.

Berger is professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell, where he is a former co-director of the UWB Labor Studies Colloquium.