My goal, as a teacher, is to engender a feeling of intellectual entitlement in my students.  By convincing students that they are capable of serious intellectual work and that being an academic is a skill and not an ‘inherent’ capacity, and, thus, can be learned, I allow students to take their academic work seriously.  My goal is to help students evaluate the connections between their various beliefs and begin to develop a coherent theoretical perspective that provides a framework for their social thinking.  At best, I want students to discover something they are passionate about and, then, to develop their own ideas and opinions out of serious engagement with reading materials, seminar discussions, lecture information, and their own research or activism.  For this reason, I'm also quite excited to be working closely with several graduate students on their own research projects.

My primary research areas are criminal justice policies and processing, the production and maintenance of racial stratification in the post-civil rights United States, and connections between conceptions of race, policy construction, and policy outcomes.

My article, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Pretrial Criminal Processing”, was published in Justice Quarterly in 2005. Another article,  “The Cumulative Effects of Racially Disparate Processing” will be published this fall in The Journal of the Institute of Justice and International Studies.  My article “The Failure of Race Neutral Policies: How Mandatory Terms and Sentencing Enhancements Contributed To Mass Racialized Incarceration” is currently under review with Critical Criminology.  

When I’m not teaching or doing research, I can usually be found doing West African dance, painting or listening to music at home, sending books to women in prison, cooking dinner with friends, or at a protest.