About Me
Bio.
Author, Professor, Educator, Speaker
Dr. George Walters-Sleyon was born in Liberia, West Africa — a nation whose very founding is intertwined with the history of freed American slaves and the long shadow of colonialism. That origin did not escape him. It shaped him. It became the lens through which he would spend decades examining the intersections of race, religion, law, and human dignity — and the driving force behind one of the most compelling voices in American criminal justice reform today.
His academic journey is nothing short of remarkable with an interdisciplinary background. From Ghana to Boston to the cobblestoned halls of Edinburgh, Scotland, Dr. Walters-Sleyon pursued knowledge with the urgency of a man who understood firsthand that ideas have consequences. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in Practical Theology, Comparative Criminal Justice (US and UK), Criminology, and Applied Ethics. He holds a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) and a postgraduate Master of Sacred Theology (S.T.M.) from Boston University in Philosophy, Social Ethics, Theology, and Christian Ministry, and earned his undergraduate degree in Theology and Administration from Central University College in Accra, Ghana.
A McDonald Distinguished Fellow at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion — one of the world’s foremost institutions at the intersection of law and religion — Dr. Walters-Sleyon is also an Associate Fellow of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research in Glasgow, Scotland, and holds a teaching certificate as an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) of the United Kingdom.
A Liberian who watched America’s promise collide with its contradictions, Dr. Walters-Sleyon channeled his scholarship into action by founding the Center for Church and Prison, Inc. — a Boston-based resource and research center studying the intersections between religion, the humanities, penal policies reform and prison culture management, international best practice development, and the criminal justice systems of the United States and United Kingdom (England and Wales, and Scotland).
As a faculty member at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, Massachusetts, Dr. Walters-Sleyon teaches Introduction to Philosophy, Applied Ethics, World Religions, Sociology, and Introduction to Criminology. His landmark two-volume work, The Rush for Black Diamonds, Volumes One and Two, is currently in use as a university textbook — a distinction that speaks to both the depth of his research and its power to transform how students understand the world they have inherited. “Black Diamonds” refers to enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade and its mutations into chattel slavery, colonialism and penal slavery into the post modern era of the 21st century.
Beyond the podium and the page, Dr. Walters-Sleyon is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a pastor of St. James AME Church in Danbury, Connecticut, a singer-songwriter, recording artist, and poet whose gospel single “God’s Been Good to Me” was nominated Gospel Single of the Year in 2004. He is a man of deep faith, wide learning, and relentless purpose — one who understands that the road from Monrovia to Edinburgh to exploring and analyzing the US and the UK penal systems is not a detour. It is the story itself.
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