Research

When people think of homelessness, they often also think of other social maladies, including addiction and crime. Indeed, much of the study of homelessness and public policy initiatives focus on managing these social ills. However, these studies are complicated by the fact that these studies and policy reviews often focus where homelessness is most prominent: research has often focused on major cities like Chicago and San Francisco or on infamous neighborhoods like LA’s Skid Row.

As a result, what we know about the relationship between homelessness and crime is actually quite limited. First, there have been very few studies that seek to understand how the “typical” city uses social control to manage homelessness, relying instead on the generalizability of findings from big cities. Second, despite studies having found that people experiencing homelessness are over-policed, there is relatively little empirical evidence seeking to establish or disprove a relationship between homelessness and crime. Finally, only recently have studies begun to think of homelessness as existing within a matrix of control, which consists of nonlegal and legal actors including doctors, non-profits, and city workers. This matrix of control blurs categorizations of social control previously theorized by social scientists, such as medicalization and formal control.

This raises a number of empirical questions I seek to examine in my research: How is homelessness framed in policy discussions by local government? Is there evidence to support that neighborhoods with high rates of homelessness experience higher rates of crime? How do people experiencing homelessness make sense of their criminalization in the context of other forms of social control, including medicalization and regulation? These questions speak to broader theoretical questions in the fields of sociology and criminology, including how narratives impact public policy as well as how different groups experience and make sense of social control. Beyond academia, these questions speak to how the average American city governs visible poverty and challenges common assumptions regarding the relationship between homelessness and crime.

I have several ongoing projects regarding surveillance and social control. Most notably, I am a member of an interdisciplinary working group in Southern Arizona that seeks to understand the impact of border surveillance technology on patterns of migration. Our publications and the questions we ask speak to the increasingly blurred lines between conceptual frameworks of “interiority,” “exteriority,” “citizen,” and “societal membership.”

Additionally, my research concerns how surveillance and other iterations of social control have devolved to individual members of society. In particular, I leverage ethnographic techniques to examine how street level bureaucrats (e.g., police, private security, shop owners) make sense of their role and in controlling crime and the use of public space.

Much of my work in deviance and crime centers on homelessness and how individuals experiencing homelessness make sense of a criminalized identity in the face of other identities (including, in particular, other criminalized racial identities, as well as self-conceptions of victimhood).

My most recent quantitative work in criminology competes criminological theories to determine which theories best capture factors associated with juvenile drug use.

This year at the American Society of Criminology, my co-authors and I will be presenting our findings from our latest publication regarding the intersections of racial formation and immigration discourse. In the publication, we discuss how the sociolegal criminalization of Latinos mirrors and informs racial boundaries.