Here are links to my CV, Google scholar page, and Academia pages. 

My research examines processes of social inclusion. With a special focus on religious organizations, I am especially interested in the role of civil society in enacting and resisting forms of punishment.  In the context of mass incarceration and the prominence of non-governmental organizations in the lives of criminalized people, I am interested in theorizing punishment, the meaning of social inclusion, and possibilities for institutional change. I use critical and feminist theories to understand social problems. My work integrates concepts across many literatures that deal with institutional change, social exclusion, and the marginalization of criminalized men and women. I employ a range of qualitative methods as I work with ethnographic, interview, and archival data. 

My research project on the social inclusion and exclusion of people returning from prison has focused on the way that governmental policies and the work of the civic sector have - to greater or lesser degrees - incorporated formerly incarcerated people as citizens. This project was supported by a dissertation improvement grant from the National Science Foundation and a Mellon-Wisconsin fellowship. With special attention to the role of religious organizations in the reentry process, I have published the findings in outlets including Punishment & Society, Theoretical Criminology, Law & Social Inquiry, and the edited volume Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century. 

Building from the prisoner reentry project, my research on race and the origins of privatization of community corrections services in the 1970s is forthcoming in the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice. 

A second research project investigates church-state relationships in drug policy. The findings are published in Critical Criminology. This project has been supported by an Ohio University Research Committee award. A third project (with Megan Welsh) examines algorithmic bias in community corrections; our chapter is in the Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography. 

Finally, I am working on book on religion and social science in criminal justice reforms in recent history in the United States. As actors from religious and social scientific organizations have worked to innovate penal policies, I am attuned to the interactions and tensions between them. I am studying their roles in movements to address prison rape, the decriminalization of homosexuality, prison conditions, and other issues. I use data gathered from an array of archives to ask how religious and social scientific groups have resisted and reinforced the power of the carceral state. Ultimately the book research asks what commitment to change each type of institution would need for deep transformation of the carceral system in the US. 

Below are links to some recently published work. The full text of most publications are on my Academia site:

Published articles

• 2023. "Community Corrections at a Critical Juncture: Privatization, Race, and the Redefinition of the Community after Attica" in the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 

• 2020. "Governing Through Partnerships: Neoconservative Governance and State Reliance on Religious NGOs in Drug Policy" in Critical Criminology.

• 2019. "Nongovernmental organizations and postprison life: Examining the role of religion" in Punishment & Society.

• 2016. "Beyond Punishment: The Penal State's Interventionist, Covert, and Negligent Modalities of Control" (lead author, with Joshua Kaiser and Cesraea Rumpf) in Law & Social Inquiry. 

• 2015. "Prisoner incorporation: The work of the state and non-governmental organizations" in Theoretical Criminology .

Published essays and book chapters

• 2021. “Contested Forms of Knowledge in the Criminal-Legal System: Evidence-Based Practice and Other Ways of Knowing among Front-Line Workers” (Nicole Kaufman and Megan Welsh). In The Palgrave Handbook of Institutional Ethnography, edited by Paul Luken and Suzanne Vaughn. (41 pp.)

• 2019. "The State’s Accomplices? Organizations and The Penal State." In Prisoner Reentry in the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives of Returning Home, edited by Keesha Middlemass and CalvinJohn Smiley.

• 2018. "Gender and Community-Based Programming" in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, edited by H. Pontell. New York: Oxford University Press.

I am a source in this news article from the Ohio Capital Journal in January, 2020, and in this news article from the Ohio University Post in 2016.

This report is the culmination of the work of students in Punishment and Society (Sociology 3660) in spring semester, 2021. We asked three Ohio professionals in corrections and social services what information from current research might be valuable to them as part of their work with people who are currently or formerly incarcerated. They listed topics including: trends in rural reentry, romantic relationships during reentry (including domestic violence and drug use), and the benefits of social support. I developed a list of recent publications and the class reviewed this research. Along with students' summary of the research, this report provides the students' suggestions for next steps for people working in the reentry field in Ohio.