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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.
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School of Criminal Justice 
