Ongoing Research 

Image: From 2022-2023 Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs Cohort at Brown University

Jail Justice Initiative

The Jail Justice Initiative (JJI) focuses on a different side of the criminal legal system: city and county jails. We are a collective of scholars studying the role of jails in the broader context of the U.S. criminal-legal system. While there has been substantial qualitative and quantitative research on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, to date, most of this research focuses on prisons–large-scale institutions capable of housing persons convicted of crimes for years at a time. Much less is known about the causes and consequences of jailing, especially for those held in pre-trial detention or on behalf of other arms of the criminal legal system. Often, jails are lumped together with prisons when discussing mass incarceration in the United States. Jails are place-based spaces that are found in virtually every county, in every state. More often than not, they are the first space people impacted by the criminal legal system encounter. With over 3000 jails nationwide, jails almost double the number of state and federal prison facilities. This project seeks to differentiate jails from prisons and understand how they have proliferated, expanded, or closed across the U.S. Our first paper, "Jailization: Entering the Lobby of the US Criminal Legal System," is out for review and available upon request.  Another working paper, “Bail Reform and the Jailing Boom/Bust: Measuring Inequality after Abolishing Commercial Bail” using data from the Vera Institute, is slated to be presented at the Vera Institute's Incarceration and Inequality Conference in fall 2025. 

Three County Opioid Project

The Three County Opioid Project was started by our late mentor Dr. Benita Roth, in 2020. This project seeks to understand how social movement fields affect political and public policy responses to the opioid epidemic in Upstate New York. Our first paper, "Death by (Data) Politics: County Approaches to the Opioid Crisis in Upstate New York" is complete and out for colleague review before journal submission.  We are slated to present this essay at the Association for the Study of Death and Society annual conference in  Utrecht, Netherlands during summer of 2025. We are also preparing proposals for funding via the National Institute of Health and other small opioid research-related grants.