These three areas of inquiry constitute my research agenda through which I investigate how legal system contact matters for social inequality, particularly for adolescents and young adults. My work is rooted in the life course perspective and uses an interdisciplinary approach to identify mechanisms of inequality in rigorous research designs spanning quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods, often in applied settings.
1. Examining Changes to Law and Policy
This area examines how individuals experience specific changes to laws and policies purported to reform some of the most punitive and harmful components of the American criminal legal system.
Changes to Young Adults' Legal System Contact and Consequences following Recreational Marijuana Legalization in New Jersey
I am currently the Principal Investigator of a three-year, mixed methods project (Sponsor: William T. Grant Foundation) examining if recreational marijuana legalization reduced racial inequalities in young adults’ system contact and consequences in New Jersey. Primary data collection will reveal how restrictions to permitted police-citizen contacts and expansion of automatic criminal record expungement are experienced by young adult males (18-25) during a pivotal developmental phase. Comparing responses across participants' race and ethnicity will indicate if legalization indeed reduces racial inequalities characteristic of drug law enforcement.
Examining the Impacts of a Reentry Payment Program for Recidivism and Reintegration
With support from the City of Philadelphia, I am conducting a mixed methods study of a novel reentry payment program created during the pandemic that provided cash assistance ($500) to persons released from jail during this time. Primary survey and interview data collection with payment recipients will be assessed in conjunction with integrated administrative data to identify how this payment affected recipients' reentry relative to a comparison sample of non-recipients over a two-year follow-up period.
Identifying Trends in Juvenile Social Control
A recently published paper (Youth Justice) examined claims that recent national-level reforms in juvenile punishment marked the end of the “get tough” era and a reversion to minimally invasive and rehabilitative interventions. I analyzed national juvenile court data (Juvenile Court Statistics) standardized by juvenile arrest data (Uniform Crime Report) to quantify changes in social control net of changes in law enforcement. I found evidence that juvenile social control became more invasive but less serious: while less severe dispositions (probation and diversion) proliferated, a given arrest was increasingly likely to result in formal system involvement that can disrupt schooling, family life, and other contemporaneous prosocial roles.
2. Identifying and Quantifying Heterogeneous Outcomes
This second area seeks to advance knowledge on the collateral harms of legal system involvement by bridging theory, data, and research design to more precisely identify the circumstances and mechanisms under which the legal system proliferates social inequality.
Age of System Contact as a Moderator of Amplified Harm
I identified whether outcomes for mental health varied across individuals’ age of arrest, conviction, or incarceration in a paper appearing in Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. Integrating insights from the life course, social stress, and cumulative disadvantage perspectives, I hypothesized that earlier-timed system contacts would be more detrimental to mental health relative to those occurring later in the life span. I tested this assertion using longitudinal data (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997), individual fixed effect models, and an interaction term exploring age of contact as a moderator of mental health (recent depression and anxiety symptoms) outcomes. While age did not moderate arrest-mental health associations, I found that the (adverse) impact of incarceration for mental health was concentrated following confinement in early adulthood (ages 16-23), raising concerns of long-term detrimental outcomes of early carceral confinement.
Accounting for Stratifying Processes in Quantitative Specifications
In a series of projects, I am engaged in a series of collaborative projects with Robert Apel to estimate the unequal consequences of legal system involvement for outcomes spanning employment and mental health. This work, appearing in RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, the 9th Edition of the Division on Corrections and Sentencing Handbook Series: Contemporary Issues in Health and Punishment, and work in development seek to identify racial and ethnic inequalities in the impact of arrest and incarceration for specified outcomes using distributional models. Other published work (The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science) identified fathers’ pre-prison family involvement as an important conditioning factor for observed behavioral outcomes for their children: results indicated that children exhibited more behavioral problems if their father was more engaged before imprisonment, while children had fewer problems if their father appears to be a destabilizing presence before imprisonment.
3. Detecting Covert Mechanisms
This final subarea explores how direct contact with the legal system is a consequential event in and of itself, sometimes constituting the “punishment” on its own through pathways less apparent in secondary and/or administrative data.
The "Stress of Injustice" for Public Defenders' Occupational Stress and Burnout
Public defenders provide legal representation to impoverished clients, placing them at the frontline of inequality in the system. This work explores how public defenders' positionality in the legal system is a mechanism through which the legal system exacerbates inequality. Two manuscripts from a collaborative qualitative research project identify how public defenders experience "the stress of injustice" by directly representing disadvantaged clients in an excessively punitive system (Social Forces) and the implications of this position for their burnout from the work (Criminal Justice Policy Review).
The Social Meaning of Legal Financial Obligations in Community Corrections and Diversion
Two related inquiries seek to deepen understanding of how individuals actively involved in the legal system understand the imposition of legal financial obligations (LFOs) in conjunction with their assessed punishment, either on community supervision or in a diversion program. Work under peer review explores how punishment-related LFOs specifically contribute to additional sanctioning relative to other LFOs.