My academic work asked how and why the United States became the world’s largest jailer. I conducted 13 months of ethnographic research in a 3,600-bed Florida prison as well as archival research in Florida, Texas, and Illinois. My work used religion as a lens to examine the development of mass incarceration. My dissertation won major awards from the University of Michigan Society of Fellows and the University of South Florida, and my research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, the Anti-Discrimination Center and the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation.
The Journal of American History published my article, “A Prison in Your Community” in June 2021. Please contact me if you need access to a copy.
My more recent projects have involved data science, survey methods, and quantitative methodologies. I have or planned to publish quantative analyses of complex surveys such as the National Crime Victimization Survey, the Survey of Consumer Finances, the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health, the Survey of Household Decisionmaking, and other sources of criminal justice and economic data. One of these projects is The Keys to Safety, which combined victimization data with economic data to produce the most detailed descriptions available of the household finances of families alongside their violent victimization rates.
The data visualization and interactive tool below are from The Keys to Safety.