|
Janet Lauritsen elected President and Beth Huebner starts term as Vice President of the American Society of Criminology
| |
Janet Lauritsen, who is a Curators' Distinguished Professor, has been named President-elect of the American Society of Criminology (ASC). The ASC is the major professional organization for criminology, serving 3500 members internationally. Lauritsen is an ASC Fellow, and has previously served as an Executive Counselor for the ASC. For the past three years, she served as the co-editor for the ASC's flagship journal, Criminology. Lauritsen will start as President-elect in November, and will serve as President starting next year (2021-2022).
Beth Huebner is starting her term as Vice President of ASC in November (2020-2021), and served as Vice President-elect this past year. Huebner has previously served as the Chair of the Division on Corrections and Sentencing. She is also the editor for the Oxford Bibliographies in Criminology and Associate Editor for Criminal Justice and Behavior.
| |
|
Lee Slocum talks about broader police reform in wake of killing of George Floyd
The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has sparked protests across America over the past three weeks and adds to a pattern of police violence that has received nationwide attention over the past six years.
There’s been a push throughout large parts of the country to reexamine the relationship between police officers and the communities they are entrusted to serve.
Lee Slocum, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, has conducted extensive research on police-citizen relations as well as how people’s environments and their own experiences shape their attitudes toward law enforcement and their willingness to report crime.
| |
Cherrell Green honored with paper and professional awards for her work
| |
Beth Huebner receives the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creativity
Huebner’s research focuses on the criminal justice system, particularly reducing prisoner populations, humanizing the experience and highlighting the impact of financial sanctions. She advocates to improve data systems at both the local and national levels. Through her research into the use of data-driven decision-making within criminal justice facilities, she seeks to improve intervention and treatment designs. Grants from the MacArthur Foundation have helped fund her critical research.
| |
Alessandra Early recognized by Division of Women and Crime
Doctoral student Alessandra Early was recently awarded honorable mention for the Siegel Graduate Fellowship for the study of Gender and Crime from the Division of Women and Crime for her work, "Queer and Nonbinary Experiences: The Spatial Dynamics of Identity, Race, and Recreational Drug Use." Early's research explores socio-spatial dynamics of identity formation and recreational substances in the LGBTQIA+ community. Utilizing a queer methodological framework, her study emphasizes pathways into drug use and into queer social spaces, motives for participating in recreational drug use within these spaces, and, generally, the role of social spaces in defining and (re)defining identity.
| |
Tom Baker discusses current criminal justice issues with Discipline and Punish Podcast
Doctoral student Tom Baker recently launched Discipline and Punish podcast to discuss some of the most pressing issues in criminal justice today, including the future of U.S. policing. He often features expert guest speakers on use-of-force, and civil unrest, and other aspects of criminal justice, with the goal to make research more accessible for public audiences. Baker, who also recently wrote an op-ed for the Guardian, studies police use-of-force.
| |
Samantha Simon wins paper prize
Assistant Professor Samanta Simon, one of the new faculty members in the department, recently won 3rd place in the American Society of Criminology's Gene Carte student paper competition for her paper, "The Police Force: Gender, Race, and Use-of-Force Training." Simon's work focuses on violence, gender, race, and organizational inequality. She is currently working on a book focusing on how the hiring and training practices at police academies emphasize the use of violence, focusing on the ways that gender and race inform these processes.
| |
Congratulations to our upcoming PhD graduates!
| |
Jennifer Medel will be defending her dissertation titled “Peace at Last or Just a Piece of Paper?: Assessing the Utilization of Civil Protection Orders and Reported Violations” this fall. In January 2021, she will join the faculty as a Lecturer at the University of the Pacific’s Department of Sociology housed in the College of the Pacific.
| |
Paige Vaughn will be defending her dissertation titled “Dual Disadvantage: An Examination of Racial Disparities in Victim and Suspect Criminal Justice Treatment” this fall. In January 2021, she will start a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Law and Social Science at the Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory working under Professor Tom Tyler. Vaughn recently authored an op-ed in the Washington Post discussing her research on where public opinion stands on messaging about the most recent protests.
| |
|
National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice Report released
Richard Rosenfeld, Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus, and Ernesto Lopez, doctoral student, recently released a report entitled "Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities" for the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. The report examines crime rates for ten offenses in 27 U.S. cities over the past several months, finding that subduing the pandemic, pursuing crime control strategies of proven effectiveness, and enacting needed police reforms will be necessary to achieve durable reductions in violent crime in American cities. This report is a follow-up to an initial report released in July. Rosenfeld, who was named to the Council on Criminal Justice in June, also wrote an op-ed discussing the rise in crime during this time period in the Washington Post.
| |
Alumni spotlight: Jennifer Cobbina discusses the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement as seen in this summer’s protests
Jennifer Cobbina wasn’t content to let official narratives shape her views about the circumstances in Ferguson and Baltimore that preceded the police killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
The University of Missouri–St. Louis alumna-turned-associate-professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University went to ground level, conducting interviews with nearly 200 residents of the two locales within two months of Brown’s and Gray’s deaths.
The things she heard about their experiences with police, both before the killings and during protests that followed, are gathered in “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter, and How They Changed America.” The 2019 book explores the Black Lives Matter movement around race, justice and policing in the United States.
| |
Criminology and Criminal Justice Undergraduate Student Association elects new officers
| |
President: Alyssa Barrow
Vice President: Sydney Stark
Treasurer: Greg McAllister
Secretary: Madison Martin
Student Government Association representatives: Alyssa Carpenter and Heaven Thomas
Social Media/Communications Director: Summer Allen
| |
|
|
|
|