Broader Research Interests

1. The relationships between religion, spirituality, morality and justice.

Objective: 

Research on injuries within the jail setting are few and far between. Perhaps the assumption that violent offending and violent victimization precede injury explains the limited attention. We suggest that there is a present need for more empirical investigations that distinctly focus on jail-based injury.

Method: 

We utilized monthly correctional health metrics for New York City jail facilities between January 2017 and June 2019, and negative binomial regression modeling to explore the facility-level predictors of injury evaluation reports (IER).

Results: 

Findings showed that youth-centric jails reduced the likelihood of IERs by 89%, and healthcare-centric jails reduced the likelihood of IERs by 91%.

Conclusion: 

Findings support the use of specialized facilities to mitigate injuries in jail. However, further examinations into the underlying mechanisms of specialized facilities that reduce injury are still required to meet the immediate needs of persons who are incarcerated in jails.

Those who have been convicted of crimes are subjected to a stigma that affects many aspects of their social lives. The “felon” label brings collateral consequences that make it difficult to obtain basic human needs, including housing. This study uses the audit method to examine the effects of race, gender, and criminal history on housing outcomes. Testers, exhibiting characteristics suggestive of race and gender and disclosing one of three offenses, placed phone calls to rental property owners across the Midwest to inquire about renting a property. We found powerful negative effects for those with a criminal record seeking apartments, regardless of whether the offense was sexual or drug related. However, we found no differences between minority and non-minority testers. We explain these findings in the context of housing as an essential resource for formerly incarcerated individuals.

Stigma associated with prior incarceration could make dating difficult. To test this in online dating, an experimental audit used constructed dating app profiles of Black, Latinx, and White males and females. Experimental and control profiles were identical with the exception of a parole disclosure statement in bios of experimental profiles. Surprisingly, the White female profile disclosing parole was the only one to match with significantly fewer users. We analyzed the racial congruence of matches and found that White parole disclosing profiles were more likely to attract White users and Black and Latinx profiles attracted more heterogeneous users regardless of parole disclosure. The interaction between racial and criminal stigma and implications for relationship prospects among the formerly incarcerated are considered. Although the timing of criminal history disclosure matters, criminal stigma is unique in app-based dating, having more negative effects for Whites, which differs from other social domains.

Individuals who have been convicted of a crime and punished with incarceration face difficulties reentering society following their release. They are stigmatized and often isolated from mainstream society, employers are less likely to hire them, and landlords are less willing to rent to them. Stigmatization of offenders is widespread because they are not protected under federal law and thus discrimination laws do not apply. This study focuses on housing and seeks to explore landlord and real estate agent reactions to prospective tenants on parole. Data were collected through phone calls to landlords and real estate agents, such that these housing proprietors believed that they were speaking with someone on parole who had been convicted previously of either drug trafficking, statutory rape, or child molestation. Results indicate that landlords are less willing to consider prospective tenants on parole than real estate agents. Real estate agents appear to respond more to rental market factors, such as the size of the fee they can earn and supply and demand in the rental market. Findings reflect the difficulty of housing for people coming out of prison. Although some have financial resources or social support to secure housing, many do not. Criminal justice policy must address this issue to improve the reintegration of people exiting prison.

4. Entrepreneurship as intervention

5. Sexual minorities and law enforcement

The October 1, 2019 conviction of Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger came as a surprise to many because the conviction of police officers for criminal homicide is rare. The Guyger conviction came one year after the conviction of Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke and fourteen months after the conviction of Balch Springs (Texas) Police Officer Roy Oliver. This Research Note compares the outcomes in these three cases to twenty-three others across a twenty-five-year period (1994–2009) and to other publicly available data about police killings through 2019 in an effort to determine whether they may represent a shift in police accountability for the use of deadly force. Preliminary findings suggest that in contrast to the 1990s, prosecutors are more likely to charge officers in deadly force cases and that more cases are resulting in conviction; but, the increased number of cases being charged has not substantially changed the rate of conviction for such cases. Similarly, there continues to be significant racial disproportionality in the identity of the victims of deadly force incidents, with unarmed Blacks representing a substantially greater proportion of victims than their percentage of the general population. We also note a “race of victim effect,” in which officers involved in these deadly encounters with Black victims are disproportionately, but not exclusively, White. The disposition of several pending cases will provide a stronger basis for assessing whether the Guyger, Van Dyke, and Oliver cases represent a trend.

In a five-to-four decision announced in February of 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the parents of an unarmed fifteen-year-old Mexican national killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in a cross-border shooting, cannot sue for damages in U.S. civil court. Here, we critique the majority and dissenting opinions and attempt to reconcile the strikingly different approach each used to resolve the case. Using a publicly available data set, we examine the homicide in Hernández v. Mesa, against the circumstances and context in which underage youth were killed by police within the United States over a five-year period before, during and after the death of Michael Brown. The circumstances of the 121 cases suggest a greater need for police accountability if the justice system is to remain true to the protective “child saving” ideology that launched the founding of the juvenile court.

The U.S. criminal justice system is designed to handle extreme cases of sexual misconduct, but the system has not adapted well to less extreme (but no less important) sexually inappropriate behaviors. As our understanding of sexual misconduct and impropriety evolves, the need for a new system of accountability seems apparent. The authors call for a new approach to providing justice for survivors/victims: the adoption of a truth and reconciliation model. This model involves providing a public forum for survivors/victims to testify to the events of their victimization and for offenders to admit previous wrongdoing, take responsibility, and ask forgiveness. While it is not appropriate for handling illegal behaviors, a truth and reconciliation model would be ideal for incidents that are not illegal but violate our evolving social norms.

Evidence-based policing emphasizes the evaluation of interventions to create a catalogue of effective programs and practices. Program evaluation has primarily been considered the purview of academic researchers, with police agencies typically uninvolved in the evaluation of their own interventions. Scholars have recently advocated for police to take more ownership over program evaluation, often arguing for an increased role of three primary entities: embedded criminologists, police pracademics, and crime analysts. While an emerging body of literature has explored these entities individually, research has yet to explore the unique contributions each can make to police-led science. The current study is a survey of scholars who authored or co-authored one or more studies included in the evidence-based policing matrix. The authors explore four distinct research questions pertaining to police-led science. Findings suggest that embedded criminologists, police pracademics, and crime analysts may each have a unique role to play in promoting police-led science.

9. Technological innovation in public safety and law enforcement

10. Autoethnography

11. Emerging and specialty research methods