Research

In my research, I investigate the scope and social consequences of mass criminalization, or the practices and policies of institutions that use surveillance and punishment to control social behavior. I draw attention to types of criminalization that often go undocumented and under-documented in conventional data sources, such as arrests, fines and fees, misdemeanors, and case outcomes falling short of conviction. To do so, I acquired, cleaned, and harmonized a novel dataset comprised of local and state administrative criminal record data from Texas. These data include record of over 30 million criminal charges, spanning from traffic citations to capital felonies, filed against 9 million unique individuals over a more than 40 year period. 

In my dissertation research, I use these data to document cohort change in the cumulative risk of multiple types of criminal legal contact across five birth cohorts of Black, White, and Latino/a men and women who reach adulthood between the prison boom of the 1990s and the era of declining incarceration rates and penal reform of the 2010s. In this paper, which is currently under review for publication, I estimate the prevalence of both misdemeanor and felony-level events across four stages of case processing - arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration - providing some of the first population-level estimates of how far-reaching the criminal legal system is in American society.

In my ongoing work, I explore the consequences of widespread and racially disparate criminalization across several dimensions using administrative criminal record data linked to individual-level, longitudinal education and employment data from the Texas Education Research Center. 

In other work, I consider how institutional practices amplify inequality at the intersection of race and class. One study, published in RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, uses the case of monetary sanctions to demonstrate how formally equal legal practices can interact with market inequalities to produce racially disparate impacts. In another project, I focus on discretionary case dispositions offered as alternatives to conviction, demonstrating how seemingly ameliorative interventions can exacerbate inequality and shedding light on a growing practice whereby criminal courts classify and mark people based on criteria reflective of social position rather assessments of guilt or innocence. 

As a post-doctoral scholar, I am expanding my work on monetary sanctions to investigate the causal effects of court debt on a host of outcomes related to inequality and wellbeing, including criminalization, financial stability, family relationships, health, and social enfranchisement. I use data from the Harvard Legal Debt Study, a field experiment initiated by Devah Pager and Bruce Western.