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EVENTS
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Recent News
Mar 20, 2023
A new job yields an unexpected alumni network
In her role supporting students at SUNY Downstate, one graduate found a built-in community.
- GC Stories
- Alumni News
Nov 9, 2022
Graduate Center Experts Analyze the Midterm Elections
Faculty members assess the 2022 elections and their consequences for U.S. politics and policy and the future of democracy.
- GC Stories
- Faculty News
Sep 22, 2022
Professor Candace McCoy on Why New Yorkers and Americans Feel Unsafe
The criminal justice expert discusses the perception and reality of rising crime.
- Faculty News
- Podcast
Jun 29, 2022
How LBGTQ Individuals Experience Criminal Justice
A queer criminologist explains why LGBTQ individuals experience being overpoliced and underserved, on the Thought Project.
- Podcast
- Alumni News
Criminal Justice Books

Lights, Camera, Feminism?
Celebrities and Anti-trafficking Politics
Celebrities in the United States have drawn significant attention and resources to the complex issue of human trafficking—a subject of feminist concern—and they are often criticized for promoting sensationalized and simplistic understandings of the issue. In this comprehensive analysis of celebrities’ anti-trafficking activism, however, Samantha Majic finds that this phenomenon is more nuanced: even as some celebrities promote regressive issue narratives and carceral solutions, others use their platforms to elevate more diverse representations of human trafficking and feminist analyses of gender inequality. Lights, Camera, Feminism? thus argues that we should understand celebrities as multilevel political actors whose activism is shaped and mediated by a range of personal and contextual factors, with implications for feminist and democratic politics more broadly.
Published May 2023
University of California Press

Handbook of Issues in Criminal Justice Reform in the United States
Elizabeth Jeglic and Cynthia Calkins, Editors
Handbook of Issues in Criminal Justice Reform in the United States
(Springer, 2021)
This handbook provides a holistic and comprehensive examination of issues related to criminal justice reform in the United States from a multidisciplinary perspective. Divided into five key domains of reform in the criminal justice system, it analyzes:
- Policing
- Policy and sentencing
- Reentry
- Treatment
- Alternatives to incarceration
Each section provides a history and overview of the domain within the criminal justice system, followed by chapters discussing issues integral to reform. The volume emphasizes decreasing incarceration and minimizing racial, ethnic and economic inequalities. Each section ends with tangible recommendations, based on evidence-based approaches for reform.
Of interest to researchers, scholars, activists and policymakers, this unique volume offers a pathway for the future of criminal justice reform in the United States.
Published July 2021
Springer 2021

Homeschooling the Right
For four decades, the number of conservative parents who homeschool their children has risen. But unlike others who teach at home, conservative homeschool families and organizations have amassed an army of living-room educators ready to defend their right to instruct their children as they wish, free from government intrusion. Through intensive but often hidden organizing, homeschoolers have struck fear into state legislators, laying the foundations for Republican electoral success.
In Homeschooling the Right, the political scientist Heath Brown provides a novel analysis of the homeschooling movement and its central role in conservative efforts to shrink the public sector. He traces the aftereffects of the passage of state homeschool policies in the 1980s and the results of ongoing conservative education activism on the broader political landscape, including the campaigns of George W. Bush and the rise of the Tea Party. Brown finds that by opting out of public education services in favor of at-home provision, homeschoolers have furthered conservative goals of reducing the size and influence of government. He applies the theory of policy feedback — how public-policy choices determine subsequent politics — to demonstrate the effects of educational activism for other conservative goals such as gun rights, which are similarly framed as matters of liberty and freedom. Drawing on decades of county data, dozens of original interviews, and original archives of formal and informal homeschool organizations, this book is a groundbreaking investigation of the politics of the conservative homeschooling movement.
Published January 2021
Columbia University Press, 2021