Research
I study the criminal legal system and ask:
How can research inform fair public policy & help us reimagine unjust approaches?
How do ordinary people & contextual factors shape social control processes?
How are people disentangling themselves from these systems?
My work is public-facing and peer-reviewed.
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Legal Financial Obligations
Alongside Dr. Karl Jones, Dr. Amanda Gilman & LFO Community Groups
In July 2024, I joined the Washington State Center for Court Research as an LFO Research Associate. In my role, I produce comprehensive reporting on statewide LFO trends and policy analysis on specific LFO legislation (HB 1169 and SB 5974). These analyses require specialized multi-method expertise in complex financial data, administrative contexts, and data-generating processes, as well as the legislative regulations related to legal financial obligations. While LFOs are complex, I aim to communicate in a clear and accessible way. WSCCR LFO work is done in close, ongoing collaboration with Civil Survival, No Price on Justice Washington, Living with Conviction, and Stand for Children Washington.
The comprehensive LFO report was covered by InvestigateWest and in the Washington State Budget & Policy Center's Schmudget Blog (a report overview and the cost of collections). Additionally, tailored highlights were presented to Washington State judicial groups (Board for Judicial Administration, Minority and Justice Commission, and the District and Municipal Court Judges' Association) and community organizations (Debt Free Youth Justice Coalition and No Price on Justice Washington).
Abolition Program Evaluation
Alongside Dr. Christina Hughes, Hannah Curtis, MA, & Success Stories
This collaboration is a large-scale mixed-methods evaluation of Success Stories, "an alternative to punishment that builds communities of integrity by delivering transformative feminist programs to Youth and Adults, with an emphasis on people who have caused harm." This program, started by a group of men incarcerated in California prisons, addresses the harms of toxic masculinity and patriarchal hierarchies using a peer-led, discussion-based, feminist-abolitionist model.
Our report examines Success Stories' efficacy at community and prison sites across California using pre- post-survey analysis, ethnographic observation, and life history interviews. This work was completed in community with Success Stories staff.
Patterns of Incarceration
Alongside Drs. Katherine Beckett, Anna Reosti, & Emily Knapus-Soran
The Place of Punishment in Twenty-First-Century America: Understanding the Persistence of Mass Incarceration This study analyzes prison admission and crime data to assess whether the penal system’s response to crime has continued to intensify since mass incarceration’s peak and whether the increasing use of prison in nonurban areas helps explain this trend. The findings show that penal intensity has continued to escalate despite falling crime rates and widespread efforts to reduce prison populations. Further, the justice system’s response to crime is most vigorous in nonurban, and especially rural, counties, where more felony arrests for all types of offenses result in a prison sentence. Although not new, this geographic difference has grown in recent years. While penal intensity thus varies notably within states, case outcomes also vary markedly across states. Comparative case studies of dynamics in a highly punitive state (Kentucky) and a less punitive state (Washington) show how formal law interacts with local dynamics not only by creating “statutory hammers” that are utilized by zealous prosecutors and judges but also by limiting the impact of aggressive prosecutorial practices on prison sentences.
Understanding the Place of Punishment: Disadvantage, Politics, and the Geography of Imprisonment in 21st century America Studies suggest that the spatial distribution of punishment in the United States is shifting. This article analyzes variation in prison admissions across U.S. counties to deepen our understanding of the contemporary geography of punishment. While research on punishment generally treats economic and political theories of punishment as distinct, we draw on recent studies of penal attitudes to develop a theoretical argument regarding their possible interconnection. We then use Hierarchical Linear Modeling to test the hypothesis that conservatism, race, and disadvantage are associated with the use of prison and that these factors help to explain why prison admission rates are higher in rural and suburban counties than in urban ones, despite notably higher crime rates in the latter. The results indicate that nonurban counties send more people to prison than urban counties and that socioeconomic disadvantage, the size of the Black population, and conservatism are significant predictors of prison admissions after controlling for crime-related problems. These findings suggest that poverty, race, and politics work in concert to shape the distribution of punishment across 21st century America.
U.S Criminal Justice Policy and Practice in the Twenty-First Century: Toward the End of Mass Incarceration? Although the wisdom of mass incarceration is now widely questioned, incarceration rates have fallen far less than what would be predicted on the basis of crime trends. Informed by institutional studies of path dependence, sociolegal scholarship on legal discretion, and research suggesting that “late mass incarceration” is characterized by a moderated response to nonviolent crime but even stronger penalties for violent offenses, this article analyzes recent sentencing-related reforms and case processing outcomes. Although the legislative findings reveal widespread willingness to moderate penalties for nonviolent crimes, the results also reveal a notably heightened system response to both violent and nonviolent crimes at the level of case processing. These findings help explain why the decline in incarceration rates has been notably smaller than the drop in crime rates and are consistent with the literature on path dependence, which emphasizes that massive institutional developments enhance the capacity and motivation of institutional actors to preserve jobs, resources, and authorities. The findings also underscore the importance of analyzing on-the-ground case processing outcomes as well as formal law when assessing the state and fate of complex institutional developments such as mass incarceration.
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Courts & Policing
Alongside Drs. Charles Lanfear, Karen Snedker, Timothy Thomas, & Katie Corcoran
Formal Social Control in Changing Neighborhoods: Racial Implications of Neighborhood Context on Reactive Policing Public reports to the police are a key component of the formal social control process and have distinct interracial dynamics. This study examines the relationship between incident severity, neighborhood context, and participant race and patterns in the determination of probable cause and arrest in reactive police contacts. We utilize a complete record of police incidents in Seattle, Washington from 2008 through 2012 including information on race of reporters and targets and type of offense. These data are matched to longitudinal tract–level census data to evaluate how incident outcomes relate to neighborhood change. Results indicate that black targets are more frequently subject to arrest overall, particularly in changing neighborhoods and when reporters are white. For nuisance crimes such as public disturbances, probable cause is found more often for white reporters but less often in changing neighborhoods.
Beyond the “Revolving Door?”: Incentives and Criminal Recidivism in a Mental Health Court Specialized mental health courts (MHCs) address the growing problem of defendants with mental illness cycling through the criminal justice system. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this article explores if MHCs can slow the “revolving door” of criminal justice involvement. We use quantitative data to evaluate the effectiveness of one MHC on different measures of criminal recidivism with logistic regression, event history analysis, and negative binomial regression. Modeling strategies report that graduates of MHC, defendants offered a dismissal of criminal charges, and defendants who maintained the same noncrisis mental health treatment while in court as they had prior to court had lower odds of new criminal charges, a longer time to a new criminal charge, and fewer new criminal charges. Qualitative data—court observations and interviews—suggest that providing incentives for program compliance, connecting defendants to planned mental health treatment services, and court completion are central to reducing recidivism.
Master's Thesis - Unlocking the Black Box of Mental Health Court Case Processing: An Event History Analysis of Extralegal Characteristics & Behavior on Case Revocation Problem solving courts are a bastion of judicial innovation and pragmatic optimism, however, their structure and case processing dynamics reintroduce high-levels of discretion to the courtroom. Past research indicates that discretionary legal environments may be vulnerable to unconscious extralegal bias and disparate treatment based defendant behavior. This paper explores the role of extralegal bias and disparate treatment in a well-established MHC. A Cox-proportional hazard analysis is used to determine the effects of defendant characteristics, during-court behavior, and interactions terms on MHC case revocation. This project builds on prior research by introducing time-dependent measures of defendant behavior, which more accurately capture the complex dynamics of MHC case processing. Findings are discussed in the context with the therapeutic ideologies and broader objectives of problem solving courts.
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Homelessness
Dissertation - Discontent, Demands, and Dehumanization: Housed Residents’ Relationship to Homelessness in a Liberal City Housed residents play an important, yet overlooked, role in the social control of homelessness in U.S. cities. Their complaints can instigate police contacts with people experiencing homelessness, encampment sweeps, and shape city budgets. However, little research explores the content of resident complaints, how they understand the problem of homelessness, and the requests they make of the government. Addressing this gap in the literature, I leverage naturally-occurring data to describe the complaints, understandings, and demands housed residents make to a liberal city government—illuminating aspects of the social control pathway linking homeless individuals with the state. I qualitatively analyze 10,588 complaint reports and 151 public comments about homelessness made by Seattle housed residents over a four-year period. I find that housed residents complain most frequently about physical disorder, incivilities, obstructions, and threats to innocent others (children and the environment). Additionally, residents understand homelessness as a problem of public safety and order, structural failures, governance failures, and as a set of issues that most negatively impact people experiencing homelessness. Residents also demand a variety of responses—direct relief, structural responses, and formal social control, among others. These findings suggest that housed residents have heterogenous ideas about homelessness, and while many complain about and demand the removal of homeless people in public spaces, many others express frustration with the city’s treatment of unhoused people. To conclude, I discuss how this project relates to social-psychological processes of dehumanization, racialized understandings of property and personhood, as well as the political possibilities that arise from better understanding housed residents’ perspectives on homelessness.
Critiquing Broken Windows
Alongside Drs. Charles Lanfear, & Ross Matsueda
Broken Windows, Informal Social Control, and Crime: Assessing Causality in Empirical Studies An important criminological controversy concerns the proper causal relationships between disorder, informal social control, and crime. The broken windows thesis posits that neighborhood disorder increases crime directly and indirectly by undermining neighborhood informal social control. Theories of collective efficacy argue that the association between neighborhood disorder and crime is spurious because of the confounding variable informal social control. We review the recent empirical research on this question, which uses disparate methods, including field experiments and different models for observational data. To evaluate the causal claims made in these studies, we use a potential outcomes framework of causality. We conclude that, although there is some evidence for both broken windows and informal control theories, there is little consensus in the present research literature. Furthermore, at present, most studies do not establish causality in a strong way.
Collective Efficacy & Broken Windows Social Experiements This extensive research with Ross Matsueda utilizes field experiments to measure the underlying relationships between collective efficacy (informal social control), physical disorder, and deviance. This work allowed us to intentionally manipulate the micro- (i.e. individual and environmental characteristics) and meso-level (neighborhood characteristics) settings to isolate particular relationships and perform causal analysis. I co-developed the research protocols and data collection practices and also conducted the field experiments, which resulted in a multilevel dataset of over 2,000 field trials and a city-wide lost letter experiment.
Other Work
A Cucumber for a Cow: A Theoretical Exploration of the Causes and Consequences of Religious Hypocrisy This paper offers a first step in a theory of religious hypocrisy. Religious hypocrisy is shown to be a rational strategy at the individual level through which the individual maximizes his/her religious gain by accessing religious rewards and minimizing the costs through selective non-compliance to the religion’s objective commitments. The pervasiveness of religious hypocrisy is argued to be a result of group level characteristics, namely the extensiveness of the religious group’s objective commitments. The level of objective hypocrisy can be moderated through variation in the members’ dependence on the group and the group’s capacity to control its members. Religious hypocrisy is a maximizing behavior; however, it is not costless and it can lead to the experience of moral dissonance. This dissonance can have group level outcomes including decline due to exit and secularization.
Religious Chameleons: Exploring the Social Context for Belonging without Believing Following previous discussions of objective religious hypocrisy, we now explore the concept of subjective religious hypocrisy; that is, belonging to a religious group but not believing in its tenets. In exchange terms, subjective hypocrisy can be understood as cheating on one’s subjective religious commitments (belief) in order to gain access to otherwise unavailable social incentives. Drawing on existing literature, we specify the social structural conditions that lead to higher levels of subjective religious hypocrisy. We also explore the costs and risks this behavior can create for individuals and the consequences it can have for religious groups. We offer a series of testable deductive propositions.
Dimensions Magazine - A publication of the UW Alzheimer's Disease Research Center I led the conceptualization and redesign of the UW ADRC's bi-yearly magazine.