Faculty and Staff News
William Pridemore has been awarded the Radzinowicz Memorial Prize for 2011. The prize is awarded each year by the British Journal of Criminology for the article that makes the greatest contribution to the development of criminology. The journal’s editor lauded Bill’s 2011 "Poverty matters: A Reassessment of the Inequality-Homicide Relationship in Cross-National Studies" as an "original and ground-breaking article." Bill surveyed several dozen prior cross-national studies that had found a positive relationship between inequality and national homicide rates but had failed to take into account the influence of poverty, the most consistent predictor of homicide rates in studies on the U.S. In replicating two of those studies, he discovered that when adjustments were made for poverty, the link between inequality and homicide disappeared, but there were consistent effects of poverty. He also highlighted the limitations of methods in this area of research and addressed the importance in the social sciences of undertaking replications: "The new results are congruent with what we know about poverty, inequality and homicide from the U.S. empirical literature and suggest that the strong conclusions drawn about the inequality-homicide association may need to be reassessed." His article can be found in Volume 51 of the journal. Bill will receive the Radzinowicz Prize in November at the annual meeting of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in London.
Click here for press release.
The University of California Press has named Professor Roger Levesque as Editor-in-Chief of the New Criminal Law Review. Focused on examinations of crime and punishment in domestic, transnational, and international contexts, the NCLR ranks as the number 1, peer reviewed, criminal law review in the world.
Provost and Executive Vice President Karen Hanson recently announced that Krystie Herndon, Academic Advisor for our department, has been selected to receive the campus' 2011 Staff Merit Award. The Provost noted that Krystie, who was chosen the 2009 Advisor of the Year, has been advising students, mentoring new advisors, and proactively tackling new challenges in the College of Arts and Sciences for over 22 years. She has become a campus advocate for diversity, understanding, and excellence, and a role model for “organizational acumen,” compassion, and “grace under pressure.”
The department's newest assistant professor, Mark T. Berg, received his doctorate in criminology from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2009, where his dissertation work was funded by a fellowship from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Professor Berg researches the social context of interpersonal violence, quantitative research methodology, and intra-individual patterns of serious offending and victimization. His current research centers on the situational dynamics of violent encounters, and the identification of stable heterogeneity in prospective panel designs.
Professor Leon Pettiway continues work on his large National Institute on Drug Abuse funded research project on criminally involved drug and non-drug using adults in Philadelphia. A study group consisting of Professor Pettiway and several graduate students have been working on his large data set that contains rich qualitative life histories as well as extensive quantitative data. The quantitative data includes socio-economic and demographic data; data on burglary, robbery, theft, shoplifting, drug dealing, and prostitution as most profitable and preferred crimes; attitudes concerning crime and punishment; geographic data on the travel patterns of offenders to commit crime and to cop drugs; travel data relating to their routine activities of drug using offenders in urban space; frequency of drug and crime participation, crime partnership arrangements; and data on their involvement in violent events as victims and perpetrators. The study group places emphasis on providing students with the opportunity to use these data for qualifying theses and dissertations, publish independent research articles, and to establish themselves as scholars in the field.
Sarita Soni, IU’s Vice Provost for Research, has appointed Professor Pridemore as Associate Director of IU’s new Consortium for Education and Social Science Research (CESSR). His primary role will be as Director of CESSR’s Workshop in Methods. CESSR was founded in 2008 with support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. Its Director is Jonathan Plucker, who is a Professor in the School of Education. CESSR’s goal is to facilitate high-quality research by creating a one-stop shop for social scientists, providing core services from research grant proposal development to surveying, statistical analysis, and evaluation expertise. The mission of the Workshop in Methods is to provide education and training in sophisticated research methods to graduate students and faculty in the social sciences at Indiana University. It does this by supplementing statistics and methods courses across campus with topical workshops led by recognized experts from across the United States. These workshops take various forms, including (1) seminars on specific research methods and tools, (2) informational presentations on topics such as grant writing, the relevant consulting provided on campus, and successfully navigating IRB, and (3) advice about working with large data sets. We hope these workshops will provide a supportive community of like-minded scholars, expose faculty and graduate students to rigorous and state of the art quantitative and qualitative methods, and highlight the excellent social science research underway at Indiana University.
CarolinaAcademic Press announces the upcoming release of Professor Steve Russell's new book, Sequoyah Rising: Problems in Post-Colonial Tribal Governance. Sequoyah Rising is the first book to address the democracy deficit in tribal governments directly but from an Indian point of view. Other attempts to deal with the question have typically been by non-Indians intent on portraying tribal governments as bastions of racial privilege and having as their object not reform but destruction.
If democratic theories underlying the US Constitution have American Indian origins, this book argues, Indians should be able to govern themselves in the 21st century in a democratic and transparent manner. Nothing written here is to absolve the US government from responsibility for the homicides, the thefts, and the broken promises, and much of that ignominious history is recounted. However, the purpose is to help Indian nations do the best they can with what they have, understanding that the most important milestone towards a return to freedom will be an end to dependence. The book further argues that the famous cases that memorialize the victories of the mainstream civil rights movement simply have no analogs in federal Indian law. It concludes that it will probably be necessary at some point to win freedom the same way the former slaves did, by exhibiting the courage demanded by militant nonviolence.
Professor Bruce D. Sales has been named the Virginia L. Roberts Professor of Criminal Justice. Before joining our department in January of 2009, he was Professor of Psychology, Sociology, Psychiatry, and Law at the University of Arizona, where he also directed its Psychology, Policy, and Law Program. Professor Sales is one of the most prolific authors and researchers in his multiple areas of scholarship, and also one of the most distinguished. He has authored over two dozen books and several hundred articles. He was the first editor of the journals Law and Human Behavior and Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science; he also is an elected member of the American Law Institute and twice served as President of the American Psychology-Law Society. He received the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology and Law from the American Psychology-Law Society, the Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Public Service from the American Psychological Association, and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the City University of New York for being the "founding father of forensic psychology as an academic discipline."
