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 family, 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, 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 Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

Edem Avakame, Ph.D., University of Alberta. Dr. Edem Avakame is an associate professor at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Newark.

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 University of Oxford, and an M.Sc. and a B.A. in sociology from University of Zagreb (Croatia). Valerio Bacak joined the faculty in 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.

Colleen Berryessa, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Berryessa joined the faculty in 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 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 (www.c3e.rutgers.edu).

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, 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 forthcomingin 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 around 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.

Leslie Kennedy, Ph.D., University of Toronto. Leslie Kennedy is currently a University Professor at Rutgers University. He teaches graduate-level courses at the School of Criminal Justice and is a core faculty member in the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers. He was the dean of the School of Criminal Justice from 1998 to 2007. Dr. Kennedy's current research in public security builds upon his previous work in event analysis, assessing the social contexts in which dangers in society are identified and deterred. He is the author or coauthor of 20 books and over 70 research articles and chapters. He has published in major journals in criminology and criminal justice, including Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Journal of Quantitative Criminology. In pursuing an interest in how risk influences the way the public and agencies manage hazards at the local and global level, he has recently published six books. With Erin E. Gibbs Van Brunschot, in Risk Balance and Security (Sage, 2009), he examines how risk is assessed by agencies faced with major hazards including crime, terrorism, environmental disaster, and disease. He has extended this work (with Ed McGarrell) to examine risk governance, particularly in the context of the globalization of these hazards, culminating in an edited book, Crime and Terrorism Risk (Routledge, 2011). In addition, (with Van Brunschot) he coauthored the book The Risk in Crime (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), which explores the use of risk in criminological theory and research. With Jean McGloin and Chris Sullivan, he has produced a reader, When Crime Appears (Routledge, 2011), that looks at the role that emergence plays in influencing crime risk. With Cynthia Lum, he published Evidence Based Counterterrorism Policy (Springer, 2011), a book that looks at how terrorism research can be improved through the use of evidence-based research. His most recent book is entitled Translational Criminology and Counter-terrorism: Global Threats and Local Responses (Springer, 2014) coauthored with Alexis Kennedy and Yasemin Yrvin-Erikson. In his most recent research, Dr. Kennedy extends his interest in risk assessment, focusing on crime mapping and the development (with Joel Caplan) of risk terrain modeling (RTM) for use by police in preventing crime. RTM is currently adopted by scores of police agencies around the world to help them forecast crime occurrences and respond through problem solving designed to address local issues. With Joel Caplan and Eric Piza, he is involved in two major federally funded research projects implementing and evaluating RTM practice in seven different cities in the United States. The RTM research has been published in major criminology journals, has received awards from ACJS, the Rutgers Newark chancellor's office, and the International Association of Crime Analysts.

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 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.

Victoria Pratt, J.D., Rutgers University. Judge Victoria Pratt is a renowned national and international advocate for reforming the criminal justice system. As the Chief Judge in Newark Municipal Court in Newark, New Jersey, she spent years using techniques that increased the public's trust in the justice system. While presiding over Newark Community Solutions, a Community Court Program, she used a transformational approach to provide alternative sentences to low-level offenders. Her TED Talk, How Judges Can Show Respect, has been translated into 11 languages and garnered over 30 million views via a Facebook clip. A globally recognized expert, her impactful work has been featured in the Guardian, Forbes and The Tamron Hall Show, to name a few. Through Pratt Lucien Consultants, LLC, she has worked jurisdictions across the nation, as well as in Europe and South America, and with corporations and institutions such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Prudential. She is currently a professor of professional practice and the director of strategic planning and program development at Rutgers School of Criminal Justice in Newark. Judge Pratt recently signed a book deal with Seal Press to author her first book, Justice Her Way, about her work as a reformer.

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, 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 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 in10 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.

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.

Jasmine Silver, Ph.D., SUNY (Albany). Dr. Silver is an assistant professor at the Rutgers-Newark School of Criminal Justice. She received her Ph.D. in criminal justice from the University at Albany, SUNY in 2018. Her 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. Her additional research interests include public opinion about criminal justice as well as police-citizen relations. She is also interested in survey methodology. Dr. Silver's recent work appears in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Law and Society Review, Law and Human Behavior, and Punishment and Society.

Mercer Sullivan, Ph.D., Columbia University. Mercer Sullivan's book Getting Paid: Youth Crime and Work in the Inner City (Cornell University Press, 1989) is widely cited as a seminal study of ecological influences on youth development. He is one of the first researchers to have studied the male role in teenage pregnancy and parenting. Dr. Sullivan's other research has examined the roles of community development corporations in promoting public safety, multiple-victim school shootings, patterns of ordinary school violence, the relation of public perceptions of youth gang activity to actual patterns of youth violence, and the social processes of reentry from juvenile incarceration. He teaches courses on qualitative research methods, violent crime, juvenile justice, developmental and life course criminology, and general criminology.

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, and 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.