Dr. Georgiann Davis, Chair of the 2022 C. Wright Mills Award Committee said of Dr. Walker's work:

In Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail, Dr. Michael L. Walker brilliantly offers us a groundbreaking and extensive ethnography that is deeply theoretical and vulnerably personal. From the very first page to the last, Walker offers us a deep analysis of being held in jail with writing so smooth that you will not be able to stop reading. It will forever change how we understand and study jail in the United States through the way it sheds new light on the atrocities of the criminal legal system. Indefinite is a must read that will undeniably transform its readers.