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  Newark Undergraduate Catalog 2022-2024 School of Criminal Justice Administration and Faculty Faculty  

Faculty


Bill McCarthy, Ph.D., University of Toronto. Dr. McCarthy joined Rutgers University-Newark in 2020. His early research focused on adolescent offending and relationships with parents, fictive families, peers, and romantic partners. In these studies, he and his coauthors developed ideas about criminal capital, co-offending, success, social bonds, and danger. Some of his more recent research examines overt discrimination and juvenile crime, while other projects use a labor perspective to examine sex work. His current work focuses on racial segregation, crime, policing, and criminal injustice in Chicago. His research has involved the collection of original survey and interview data from homeless adolescents and adults working in the sex industry, as well as analyses of secondary survey data and official data. His awards include the 2020 American Society of Criminology Mentor Award and the 2020 University of California Davis Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentorship Award; the 2010 American Society of Criminology (ASC) Outstanding Paper Award (for McCarthy, B. & Casey, T. [2008]. Love, sex and crime: Adolescent romantic relationships and offending. American Sociological Review, 73, 944-969); and the 1998 ASC American Michael J. Hindelang Outstanding Book on Crime and the 1997 Society for the Study of Social Problems. C. Wright Mills Outstanding Book on Social Problems Award (for Hagan, J. & McCarthy, B. [1997]. Mean streets: Youth crime and homelessness. New York: Cambridge University Press).
 
Robert Apel, Ph.D., University of Maryland. Robert Apel (pronounced AY-pull) received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland in 2004, and joined Rutgers University-Newark in 2011. He received a B.A. in criminology and Spanish, from Drury University. His research entails studies in a variety of international contexts. The substantive area in which he has been most active concerns the labor market, which includes research and commentary on the relationship between employment and crime; the impact of criminal justice involvement on long-term employment; the comparative effects of unemployment versus other government benefits on recidivism; and the efficacy of employment-based reentry programs. He has also investigated the consequences of a variety of transitional life events for crime and well-being, including experiences related to marriage, military service, victimization, and incarceration. Some of his applied research has evaluated deterrence-focused crime policies, situational counterterrorism interventions, and field experiments to improve procedural justice in police-citizen encounters. Dr. Apel's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He currently serves on the editorial boards of five leading criminological journals: Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and Criminology and Public Policy. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.
 
Keisha April, Ph.D., Drexel University. Dr. April earned a Ph.D. and M.S. in clinical psychology from Drexel University, a J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and an A.B. in psychology from Princeton University. Keisha April joined the faculty at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice in 2022. Her research, situated at the intersection of psychology and criminal justice, examines factors that contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. Specifically, her work seeks to promote a greater understanding of the relationships between communities of color and the police. Using mixed methods approaches, Dr. April examines the attitudes and beliefs of the individuals who interact with and work within the justice system to inform policies and practices to reduce disparities and promote more positive outcomes for justice-involved youth. She utilizes her interdisciplinary training as an applied researcher, clinician, and legal practitioner to devise ecologically sound and community-driven research questions.
 
Valerio Bacak, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Bacak earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, an A.M. in statistics from the Wharton School, an M.A. in sociology from the University of Oxford, and an M.Sc. and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Zagreb (Croatia). Valerio Bacak joined the faculty of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in 2015. His main research interest is in understanding how offending and contact with the criminal justice system are related to health. His other lines of research include youth sexuality, health disparities, and social epidemiology of HIV/AIDS among sex workers, injection drug users, and men who have sex with men. Originally from Croatia, Dr. Bacak has extensive international experience conducting research in resource-limited settings. Since 2005, he consulted on public health projects for various United Nations organizations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Azerbaijan, West Bank and Gaza, and Iraq. His studies have appeared in journals across disciplines, such as Social Problems, Social Science and Medicine, and Archives of Sexual Behavior.
 
Brenden Beck, Ph.D., City University of New York - Graduate Center. Dr. Beck received his Ph.D. in sociology from the City University of New York - Graduate Center in 2018. He studies policing, city budgeting, housing, and suburbs. A current research project of his investigates how municipal governments shift funding from social services to policing during recessions and how those shifts influence long-term crime rates. His previous research examined how cities' reliance on fine-and-fee revenue affects their frequency of police killings, how police budget size shapes police practices, and how gentrification and suburbanization affect misdemeanor arrest rates. He has published in the Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, Police Quarterly, the British Journal of Criminology, and elsewhere. Prior to joining Rutgers in 2023, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Denver and the University of Florida. 

Colleen Berryessa, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Berryessa joined the faculty of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in 2018. Her research, utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods, examines discretion in the criminal justice system and how it may affect responses to criminal offending, specifically in courts. She particularly focuses on how social contexts and societal attitudes toward psychiatric disorders and research on biological influences to behavior may affect the justice process and legal decision-making. Dr. Berryessa received her Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. Before Penn, she graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in government and mind, brain, and behavior, and she served as a CIRGE research fellow at Stanford University.
 
Joel Caplan, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Joel Caplan joined the Rutgers faculty in 2008 after receiving a Ph.D. in social welfare from the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as deputy director of the Rutgers Center on Public Security, where he collaborates with faculty and practitioners from various disciplines to use geospatial technologies in innovative and meaningful ways. Dr. Caplan's research focuses on geographic information systems (GIS), risk assessment, crime prevention, policing, and police-community relations. He has past professional experience as a police officer, 911 dispatcher, and emergency medical technician, which gives him a unique research perspective. Through the practice of computational criminology, Dr. Caplan draws from several disciplines to build new methods and techniques for the analysis of crime and crime patterns. Most recently Dr. Caplan invented Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM), which is used throughout the United States and around the world. RTM has led to the development of new methods and the RTMDx Utility (http://www.rutgerscps.org/software.html), which are now used by people in more than 45 countries. Dr. Caplan's theory-driven scholarship delivers widely accessible products that are evidence-based, actionable, and have practical value to many public safety and security stakeholders.
 
Ko-lin Chin, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Ko-lin Chin has written extensively on issues related to Chinese crime groups and networks, including gangs and tongs in the United States, human smuggling organizations in China and the United States, organized gangs in Taiwan, drug producing and trafficking groups in the Golden Triangle, and sex trafficking networks in Asia and the United States. Dr. Chin has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, as well as two Fulbright Scholarships for his work on transnational organized crime.
 
Johnna Christian, Ph.D., University at Albany. Johnna Christian received a Ph.D. from the University at Albany School of Criminal Justice in 2004. Her work examines incarceration's impact on families and neighborhoods, emphasizing the gendered aspects of family members' connections to prisoners, as well as the disparate impact on racial and ethnic minority groups. She has conducted research about family visiting at prisons and the social and economic implications of maintaining ties to prisoners. Recent work focuses on the role of informal social support in the reentry process, including a study of a family-based prisoner reentry intervention for young people and a mentoring program for formerly incarcerated women. She is a member of the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network (RDCJN), now based at Rutgers University-Newark.
 
Ronald V. Clarke, Ph.D., University of London. Ronald Clarke was dean of the School of Criminal Justice from 1987-1998. Before moving to the United States in 1984, he was employed for 15 years in the British government's criminological research department, the Home Office Research and Planning Unit. He became the director of the unit in 1982. While at the Home Office, he jointly developed the rational choice perspective on crime with Derek Cornish and helped to launch the British Crime Survey. He also led the team that originated situational crime prevention and is now considered to be the world's leading authority on that approach. Dr. Clarke is the founding editor of Crime Prevention Studies and is the author or joint author of more than 300 books, monographs, and papers, most recently including Superhighway Robbery: Preventing E-commerce Crime (Willan Publishing, 2003), Become a Problem Solving Crime Analyst (U.S. Dept. of Justice, 2005), and Outsmarting the Terrorists (Praeger, 2006). Dr. Clarke is the associate director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, a virtual institute (www.popcenter.org), and he has been visiting professor at University College London since 2001. In 2012, his colleagues and former students published a festschrift in his honor (The Reasoning Criminologist, Routledge, 2012) and in 2015 he was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. His current research focuses on wildlife crimes.

Todd Clear, Ph.D., University at Albany. Todd Clear also earned an M.A. in criminal justice from the University at Albany School of Criminal Justice; and a B.A., honors in sociology, and social work from Anderson College. Dr. Clear is a University Professor of Criminal Justice. He has served previously as provost of the university and before that dean of the School of Criminal Justice. Dr. Clear has also held professorships at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (where he held the rank of Distinguished Professor), Florida State University (where he was also associate dean of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice), and Ball State University. He has authored 13 books and over 100 articles and book chapters. His most recent book is The Punishment Imperative (NYU Press, 2013). He has also written on community justice, correctional classification, prediction methods in correctional programming, community-based correctional methods, intermediate sanctions, and sentencing policy. He is currently involved in studies of mass incarceration, the criminological implications of "place," the economics of justice reinvestment, and college programs in prisons. Dr. Clear has served as president of the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Association of Doctoral Programs in Criminology and Criminal Justice. His work has been recognized through several awards, including those of the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the Rockefeller School of Public Policy, the American Probation and Parole Association, the American Correctional Association, and the International Community Corrections Association. He was the founding editor of the journal Criminology & Public Policy, published by the American Society of Criminology.
 
Frank Edwards, Ph.D., University of Washington. Dr. Edwards received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Washington in 2017 and joined the Rutgers-Newark School of Criminal Justice in 2018. His work focuses on how systems of social control produce and reinforce inequality, and explores how politics, policy feedbacks, and social structures affect the relationships between families and the state. His recent and ongoing work examines the interactions of child welfare, criminal justice, and welfare state systems; the causes of entrenched racial inequalities in child welfare system involvement; the geographic distribution of police violence; and the causes and consequences of local governments' dependence on revenues from the criminal justice system. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Sociological Review, The American Journal of Public Health, Annual Review of Criminology, Children and Youth Services Review, The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and other outlets.
 
Alex Gimenez-Santana, Ph.D., Rutgers University. Dr. Alejandro Giménez-Santana is deputy director of the Rutgers Center on Public Security (RCPS) and director of the Newark Public Safety Collaborative (NPSC). He has worked extensively in researching the association between unique contexts of social disorganization and crime risk on the spatial distribution of violence across various urban settings. Dr. Santana has served as a consultant for the World Bank regional office in Bogotá, Colombia, and for the Inter-American Development Bank in Montevideo, Uruguay. Currently, he is directing a multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to improve public safety in the city of Newark through the application of an evidence-based, data-informed community engagement effort.

Elizabeth Griffiths, Ph.D., University of Toronto. Elizabeth Griffiths also earned an M.A. in sociology from the University of Toronto and a B.A. (First Class Honours) in sociology from the University of Calgary. She received a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Toronto in 2007. She held a faculty position in the Department of Sociology at Emory University before moving to Rutgers University-Newark's School of Criminal Justice in 2011. Dr. Griffiths's research focuses broadly on the influence of place on the distribution and movement of crime across space. More specifically, her work closely attends to spatiotemporal changes in the distribution of crime, refining the measurement of space and spatial influence, and delineating the implications of urban, suburban, and rural context on crime. Recently, her scholarship has begun to explore how system actors and policy officials substantively shape case processing and criminal justice outcomes. In a large, multidisciplinary, mixed-method project funded by the National Science Foundation, Dr. Griffiths examines how race, space, and geography condition the policing, prosecution, and punishment of felony drug crimes over a decade in Fulton County, Georgia.

Sarah E. Lageson, Ph.D., University of Minnesota. Dr. Lageson earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2015, an M.A. from the University of Minnesota, and a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. Sarah Lageson is an assistant professor at the Rutgers University-Newark School of Criminal Justice. She studies public access to criminal justice data, error in criminal record databases, and associated issues with punishment, constitutional rights, and inequality. Her current research examines the growth of online crime data that remains publicly available, creating new forms of "digital punishment." She is a grant recipient of the 2017 National Institutes of Justice New Investigator/Early Career Program in the Social and Behavioral Sciences and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) for her study of criminal record accuracy. Dr. Lageson's work has appeared in Criminology, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Punishment & Society, the British Journal of Sociology, Contexts, and numerous edited volumes. Dr. Lageson has also worked as an Americorps VISTA volunteer for the Minnesota Prisoner Reentry Program and as a research coordinator for the Council on Crime and Justice in Minneapolis. She is interested in a mixed-methods approach and producing scholarship accessible to policy and broader public debate.
 
Pilar Larroulet, Ph.D., University of Maryland. Dr. Larroulet earned her Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland in 2020. Her research focuses on continuity in offending behavior within and across generations, as well as the consequences of interactions with the criminal justice system, with a particular emphasis on gender and incarceration. Prior to joining Rutgers, Pilar served as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universidad Católica de Chile.

Jody Miller, Ph.D., University of Southern California. Jody Miller is a distinguished professor and undergraduate program chair at Rutgers-Newark School of Criminal Justice. She is also a fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC); coeditor of the ASC's flagship journal, Criminology; and 2017 ASC vice president. She is codirector of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network (RDCJN) and coordinator of the RDCJN's Research Experience for Undergraduates initiative. Dr. Miller's research utilizes qualitative methods to investigate how inequalities of gender, race, sexuality, and place shape participation in crime and risks for victimization, with concentrations in the United States and South Asia. Her books include Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (NYU Press, 2008)--winner of the American Sociological Association's Race, Class and Gender Section Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award (2010) and finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award (2009)--and One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs, and Gender (Oxford University Press, 2001). Dr. Miller has published dozens of articles and book chapters in Criminology, Gender & Society, Signs, Theoretical Criminology, the British Journal of Criminology, and other publications. She is a past recipient of the American Society of Criminology Mentor Award (2015), the Coramae Richey Mann Award from the ASC Division on People of Color and Crime (2009), the ASC Division on Women and Crime's Distinguished Scholar Award (2010) and New Scholar Award (2001), and the ASC's Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award (2001).

Joel Miller, Ph.D., University of Surrey (UK).
Joel Miller has spent nearly two decades conducting criminal justice research in both academic and policy settings and joined the Rutgers faculty in 2009. His work is international in scope, reflecting a career that has seen employment at the UK Home Office, the University of Malaga in Spain, and the Vera Institute of Justice, New York. He has conducted research on a range of criminological topics including lifestyles and offending, risk assessment, offender rehabilitation, and police accountability. A defining focus of Dr. Miller's research is how rule-breaking behaviors, among both criminal justice practitioners and offenders, are structured by the contexts in which they operate, including physical places and the networks and institutions with which they routinely interact.

Michael Ostermann, Ph.D., Rutgers University. Michael Ostermann is an assistant professor at the Rutgers University-Newark School of Criminal Justice. His research interests primarily lie within the fields of prisoner reentry and corrections, and how they intersect with public policy. His recent work investigates the impact of postrelease reentry services upon recidivism, whether effects vary across different levels of programmatic quality, how the privatization of correctional services influence mechanisms of social control, and how measurement strategies by researchers translate into different policy prescriptions within evaluation research. Dr. Ostermann has served as principal investigator on several federally funded grants that investigate research questions about evidence-based crime policies, and has partnered with practitioners and other criminal justice stakeholders. The American Probation and Parole Association has awarded his research activities, and he recently received the American Society of Criminology's Division on Sentencing and Corrections' Distinguished New Scholar award for his early career scientific contributions. His student mentoring efforts have been awarded by Rutgers University, The College of New Jersey (his alma mater), and the American Criminal Justice Association have awarded him for his service contributions as a publicly engaged scholar.

Andres F. Rengifo, Ph.D., City University of New York-Graduate Center.
Andres Rengifo received an M.A. from John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a B.A. from Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia). He is an associate professor in the School of Criminal Justice, at Rutgers University-Newark. His research explores how crime and crime control are shaped by social factors and institutions, and how the "practice" of justice, social control, and punishment amplify some forms of inequality and create new systems of stratification. His collaborative work on race, neighborhood crime, and corrections/policing reform has appeared in leading journals such as Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Evaluation Review, among others. Dr. Rengifo has also helped leverage policy change domestically and abroad as an affiliated researcher on topics such as police stops, prisoner reentry, and drug treatment at the Vera Institute of Justice and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His current research focuses on the operation of first-appearance/arraignment courts in 10 jurisdictions in the United States and Latin America (Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina). More specifically, he draws on the direct observation of more than 1,600 cases to document how justifications of punishment and rehabilitation by courtroom actors vary across cases and contexts, and how these discourses and debates relate to key dimensions of procedural justice and decisions about charging and bail/pretrial detention.
 
Ebony Ruhland, Ph.D., University of Minnesota. Dr. Ruhlandearned a Ph.D. in social work from the University of Minnesota, an M.A. in counseling and psychological services from St. Mary¿s University, and a B.A. in sociology of law, crime, and deviance from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on how criminal justice policies and practices impact individuals, families, and communities. Dr. Ruhland is currently working on research projects in four areas: 1) examining factors that lead to probation revocations, including the use probation conditions, specifically supervision fees; 2) exploring factors parole members consider to determine readiness for release; 3) identifying ways to bridge police and community relationships; and 4) examining the impacts of parental incarceration on children.
 
Norman Samuels, Ph.D., Duke University. Dr. Samuels recently returned to the faculty after serving for three decades in senior university administrative roles. His research interests are in the fields of terrorism and counterterrorism, security and intelligence studies, and the intersection of international terrorism and crime, and in particular, the interface among these topics and the American system of government. He teaches courses and advises graduate students in these areas. He is a University Professor and provost emeritus.

Jason Silver, Ph.D., SUNY (Albany).
Dr. Silver is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark School of Criminal Justice. He received his Ph.D. in criminal justice from the University at Albany, SUNY in 2018. His primary area of research explores the role of moral judgment in diverse areas of crime and justice, including punishment preferences, perceptions of the justice system, and offending. His additional research interests include public opinion about criminal justice as well as police-citizen relations. He is also interested in survey methodology. Dr. Silver's recent work appears in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Law and Society Review, Law and Human Behavior, andPunishment and Society.

Bonita Veysey, Ph.D., University at Albany.
Bonita Veysey is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Newark. Prior to her employment at Rutgers, Dr. Veysey was a senior research associate at Policy Research Associates in Delmar, New York. During that time, she was the director of the women's program core and the associate director of the National GAINS Center, a policy and technical assistance center that provides guidance and support on mental health and substance abuse treatment to institutional and community corrections agencies across the United States. She was also a primary researcher in the area of mental health-criminal justice systems interactions. Dr. Veysey's research to date has focused on behavioral health and justice issues, including continuity of care and reentry; police interactions with persons with mental illnesses; mental health and substance abuse treatment in jails and prisons; diversion and treatment services for youth with behavioral health problems; treatment and supervision of justice-involved girls and women; and the adult consequences of early childhood trauma. She was the coprincipal investigator of the Franklin County (MA) site of the SAMHSA-funded "Women, Co-occurring Disorders and Violence Study," and was the lead evaluator on the CSAT-funded RECOVER Project also in Franklin County. More recently, Dr. Veysey has focused her attention on issues of transformation and recovery. In the past few years, she has developed projects to investigate: (1) how individuals with stigmatized statuses overcome their pasts (Moments of Transformation study); (2) the nature of offender reform through the collection of oral histories of formerly incarcerated persons (Narratives of Prisoner Reform); and (3) how implicit self-stereotyping affects persons with criminal experiences (Implicit Criminal Identity studies). Dr. Veysey continues to consult with local communities and corrections agencies to help develop comprehensive supports (including peer-to-peer models) for people in recovery from addictions, physical and sexual abuse, mental health problems, and those returning from jail and prison.

Sara Wakefield, Ph.D., University of Minnesota. Sarah Wakefield earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2007, an M.S. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin, and a B.A. in sociology (law, crime, and deviance) also from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests focus on the consequences of mass imprisonment for the family, with an emphasis on childhood well-being and racial inequality, culminating in a series of articles and book, Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality (Oxford University Press) with Chris Wildeman. More recently, Dr. Wakefield is working on several original data collection projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice. The Prison Inmate Networks Studies (PINS and WO-PINS) leverage a variety of methods and data sources (surveys, intensive interviews, administrative data, and social network analysis) to more fully understand how social ties influence the conditions of confinement, community reintegration, and social inequality. 

See https://rscj.newark.rutgers.edu/people for the most up-to-date list of faculty and their respective areas of specialization.
 
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