Youth/Police Conference: Speaker Bios
Emily Buss
Emily Buss's research interests include children's and parents' rights and the legal system's allocation of responsibility for children’s development among parent, child, and state. In recent years, she has focused particular attention on the developmental impact of court proceedings on court-involved children, including foster youth and youth accused of crimes. In addition to courses focused on the subjects of her research, Buss teaches civil procedure, evidence, and family law.
Buss received her BA summa cum laude from Yale University in 1982 and her JD from Yale Law School in 1986. After graduating from law school, Buss clerked for Judge Louis H. Pollak of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1989 to 1990, Buss worked as a staff attorney in the Child Advocacy Unit of the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau. In 1990, Buss joined the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, and from 1993 to 1996, she served as the Center's deputy director.
Jane Castor
During her 30 years as Tampa Police Officer, Chief Jane Castor has built a reputation for working side by side with citizens, neighborhood leaders, activists and business owners to solve crime problems and improve our community. Those strong partnerships are now the foundation of the Department's crime reduction strategy, leading to unprecedented success in making Tampa a safer city. Since it's induction in 2003, Chief Castor's Focus on Four crime reduction plan has been the driving force behind Tampa's 65.8% reduction in crime.
Chief Castor was elected president of her police academy class and quickly moved through the ranks. She has served in nearly every capacity within the Department from Patrol, Narcotics, Family Violence and Sex Crimes to Criminal Intelligence, the Field Training Program and Administration.
In 2003, then Lieutenant Castor assumed the lead role in the Department of Homeland Security's Tampa Bay Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), she has become a pioneer in using homeland security trends in local law enforcement.
Her dedication to the community reaches far beyond her role within the Tampa Police Department. Chief Castor serves on numerous boards in our community and continues to work with and mentor at risk children.
Jane attended the University of Tampa on an athletic scholarship in Basketball and Volleyball, where she earned a Bachelor's of Science in Criminology. In 2006, she was inducted into the University's Athletic Hall of Fame and in 2010 was the recipient of the Alumni Achievement Award. Jane also holds a Master's of Public Administration from Troy State University and is a graduate of the prestigious FBI National Academy.
Most notably, Chief Castor was named Law Enforcement Executive of the Year by the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives in 2009.
Marquez (Marq) Claxton
Marquez (Marq) Claxton retired as a Detective from the New York City Police Department in 2005. His more than 20 year Police career included both patrol and investigative assignments including Plainclothes Anti-Crime, the Organized Crime Control Bureau/Narcotics Division as an investigator and undercover and as an investigator with the Social Club Task Force within the Public Morals Division. As a precinct Detective, Marq conducted thousands of investigations and ultimately became the Domestic Violence/Child Abuse Coordinator and the Identity Theft Coordinator.
During his active law enforcement career, Marq utilized personal and professional experiences to educate the public on a variety of issues concerning community relations & law enforcement. A co-founder and former spokesperson for 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care™, Marq was instrumental in developing innovative programs that addressed a wide range of issues including ‘Police Community Relations’, ‘Conflict Resolution’, ‘Gang Prevention and Awareness’, ‘Youth Safety & Awareness’, ‘Senior Safety’ and ‘What to Do When Stopped by the Police” to name a few.
Marq currently serves as the Director of Public Relations & Political Affairs for the BLACK LAW ENFORCEMENT ALLIANCE™. Marq’s organizational and affiliation history includes: Co-Chair of the “Gangs, Guns & Gainful Employment” subcommittee of the New York State Democratic Conference’s ‘Operation S.N.U.G./ member of the New York State Blue Ribbon Commission of Gang Violence Prevention/ life-member of the N.A.A.C.P./ member of C.E.M.O.T.A.P. (Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People)/ and a board member for South Carolina based not-for-profit community support network-THE UJIMA GROUP.
Cathy Cohen
Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science and chair of the department. She has served as the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and is the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Her work has been published in numerous journals and edited volumes including the American Political Science Review,GLQ, NOMOS, and Social Text. Cohen is principal investigator of two major projects: The Black Youth Projectand the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.
Herschella Conyers
Herschella Conyers received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1972 and her JD from the Law School in 1983. Prior to joining the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic in the fall of 1993, Ms. Conyers served as an assistant public defender, a supervisor, and a deputy chief in the office of the Cook County public defender.
Demitrous Cook
Demitrous Cook is currently Chief of Police for the Village of Glenwood Illinois. Chief Cook retired as Deputy Chief of Investigations from the Evanston Police Department and is currently in his thirty-fifth year of police service. He received his M.S. Degree from Lewis University and is a graduate of Northwestern University’s School of Police Staff and Command; Northwestern University’s Executive Leadership Course; The Senior Management Institute for Police at Harvard University and the FBI MLEEDS. Chief Cook is an active member of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, The Police Executive Research Forum and The International Assoc. of Chiefs of Police. He also serves as Vice-President of the South Suburban Emergency Response Team (SSERT), coordinating SWAT operations for South Suburban Cook County. Chief Cook grew up on the south side of Chicago in the Altgeld Gardens Public Housing Complex and currently resides in the south suburbs with his wife Lucia Cook and daughter Laila Cook. He can be contacted at policechief@villageofglenwood.com.
Jennifer Eberhardt
A social psychologist at Stanford University, Jennifer Eberhardt investigates the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide ranging array of methods—from laboratory studies to novel field experiments—Eberhardt has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society, and in particular shape actions and outcomes within the domain of criminal justice.
Eberhardt's research not only shows that police officers are more likely to identify African American faces than white faces as criminal, she further shows that the race-crime association leads people to attend more closely to crime related imagery. In one experimental study, for example, people who were exposed to black faces were then more quickly able to identify a blurry image as a gun than those who were exposed to white faces or no faces.
The race-crime association extends beyond the laboratory. Using an actual database of criminal defendants convicted of a capital crime, Eberhardt has shown that among defendants convicted of murdering a white victim, defendants whose appearance was more stereotypically black (e.g. darker skinned, with a broader nose and thicker lips) were sentenced more harshly and, in particular, were more likely to be sentenced to death than if their features were less stereotypically black. This finding held even after the researchers controlled for the many non-racial factors (e.g. the severity of the crime, aggregators, mitigators, the defendant's attractiveness, etc.) that might account for the results.
Extending the sentencing research to juveniles, Eberhardt found that bringing to mind a black juvenile offender leads people to view juveniles in general as more similar to adults and therefore deserving of more severe punishment. Further, in a study with actual registered voters, Eberhardt found that highlighting the high incarceration rate of African Americans makes people more, not less, supportive of the draconian policies that produce such disparities.
Eberhardt's research suggests that these racialized judgments may have roots deeper than contemporary rates of crime or incarceration. In a series of studies, she has unearthed evidence that African Americans sometimes become objects of dehumanization. Specifically, Eberhardt has found that even people who profess to be racially unbiased may associate apes and African Americans, with images of one bringing to mind the other.
The dehumanization finding may help to explain the dynamics that occur within the criminal justice context, where high profile controversies feature African Americans who are shot by police or citizens who feel threatened, even though the African American is unarmed. According to Eberhardt's research, the implicit association between African Americans and apes may lead to greater endorsement of police violence toward, or mistreatment of, an African American suspect than a white suspect.
In on-going research, Eberhardt is investigating whether the African American-ape association is one example of a more generalized belief that African Americans are not as evolved as other people. This view may, ironically, be buttressed by the (erroneous) lay belief that black Africans developed earlier in the evolutionary process than did their white counterparts who are associated with Europe.
As daunting as are the problems Eberhardt illuminates, she has recently begun to work with law enforcement agencies to design interventions to improve policing and to help agencies build and maintain trust with the communities they serve. The problems associated with race are ones we have created, she believes, and they are also ones we can solve. Spurred by the innovation that is the hallmark of Silicon Valley, she aims to combine social psychological insights with technology to improve outcomes in the criminal justice context and elsewhere.
Jennifer Eberhardt received a B.A. (1987) from the University of Cincinnati, an A.M. (1990) and Ph.D. (1993) from Harvard University. From 1995 to 1998 she taught at Yale University in the Departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies. She joined the Stanford faculty in 1998, and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and co-director of SPARQ, a university initiative to use social psychological research to address pressing social problems.
Steve Edwards
Steve Edwards is Executive Director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, which is led by former White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod. Previously, he was an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared on the BBC, Bloomberg, PBS and PRI. Most recently, he spent nearly 14 years at WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR member station, where he served as host of the acclaimed daily shows The Afternoon Shift and Eight Forty-Eight.
Craig B. Futterman
Prior to his 2000 appointment to the Law School faculty, Craig Futterman was the Director of Public Interest Programs and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. He graduated with the highest distinction from Northwestern University in 1988, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in sociology and economics. He then graduated from Stanford Law School in 1991. Following law school, he was a trial attorney in the Juvenile Division of the Cook County Public Defender's Office. In 1994, he joined Futterman & Howard, Chtd., a boutique Chicago law firm concentrating on complex federal litigation. There, Mr. Futterman specialized in civil rights lawsuits, focusing on matters involving police brutality and racial discrimination. He has litigated a number of noteworthy cases, including Jaffee v. Redmond, 116 S.Ct. 1923, a federal civil rights suit, where Mr. Futterman successfully represented the family of an African American father shot and killed by a suburban police officer. The case also created a federal evidentiary privilege for psychotherapists and their patients. He additionally litigated People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 851 F.Supp. 905 (N.D.Ill. 1994); 90 F.3d 1307 (7th Cir. 1996), 171 F.3d 1083 (7th Cir. 1999), a class action Constitutional lawsuit that demonstrated a decades-long pattern of educational discrimination and segregation which permeated almost every aspect of Rockford's school system.
Mr. Futterman founded the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic in Fall 2000.
Adam Green
He received his BA from The University of Chicago (1985) and his Ph.D. from Yale University (1998). He teaches and research in a variety of fields, including twentieth century U.S. history, African American history, urban history, cultural studies and social movements. He has written and co-edited two books: Selling the Race: Culture and Community in Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (Univ. of Chicago Press: 2006);Time Longer than Rope: Studies in African American Activism, 1850-1950, co- edited with Charles Payne (New York University Press: 2003). His current book research deals with the history of the black struggle for happiness, and he is developing several articles projects dealing with segregation, police torture, and post-1970 culture and society in Black Chicago.
Tytania Holliman
Tytania Holliman is a graduating senior at Hyde Park High School, and an active member of the Youth/Police Project. She speaks publicly about her experiences being stopped and harassed by police officers. Tytania directed and produced a short film with her classmates, Offsides, which has shown at several film festivals. Tytania would like to study film as a way of producing visually beautiful and emotionally powerful stories about human relationships.
Emmitt C. House
Emmitt C. House is a retired attorney whose law practice centered around representing clients in the energy industry throughout North America and elsewhere. He earned a B.A. in Anthropology from Carleton College and J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law. He also spent several years as an anthropologist with a concentration on francophone West Africa, having studied in Britain, France and West Africa. He has been engaged in a broad spectrum of community and civic affairs in Chicago. He has served on numerous business and not for profit boards, such as Public Radio Station WBEZ, Crown Youth Center, Chicago Council on Urban Affairs, the Experimental Station and Williams Pipeline Partners. He has been actively involved in the Youth/Police Project.
Chaclyn Hunt
Chaclyn Hunt is a police misconduct organizer and attorney, and the director of the Youth/Police Project.
Delores Jones-Brown
Delores Jones-Brown J.D., Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration and the founding Director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice (CRCJ) at John Jay College. She has taught graduate courses in the John Jay Police Studies Certificate Program aimed at developing police leaders who can work effectively with multicultural populations. Her recent work has focused on the legal, practical and ethical implications of police practices in New York City, particularly with regard to its racial impact. In 2008, she helped plan, organize and execute the College’s first tripartite convening of police practitioners, academic researchers and community-based organizations and advocacy groups to discuss the topic: Stop, Question and Frisk: Policy, Practice and Research, as an important aspect of police accountability. Subsequent convenings have compared police practices in the UK and the US and explored viable alternatives for achieving effective community-based policing. She is the lead author of “Stop, Question and Frisk Policing Practices in New York City: A Primer,” a highly cited report describing the contours of stop and frisk policing in New York from 2002 to 2013. The revised primer is accessible through www.stopandfriskinfo.org, an archive of academic and public policy research on policing. The site was co-developed by Dr. Jones-Brown and launched by the CRCJ in 2013. Dr. Jones-Brown’s publications include an award-winning book, three co-edited volumes and numerous book chapters, journal articles and legal commentaries related to race and policing. Her work has been supported by the Open Society Foundations, Atlantic Philanthropies, and the Tides Foundation. She is an executive board member of the Center for Policing Equity, a research consortium that promotes police transparency and accountability by facilitating innovative research collaborations between law enforcement agencies and empirical social scientists. She recently gave testimony on community policing research before President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Mariame Kaba
Mariame Kaba is the founding director of Project NIA. From 2004 to 2009, she was a program officer at the Steans Family Foundation where her work focused on education, youth development and evaluation.
Mariame has been active in the anti-violence against women and girls movement since 1989. Her experience includes coordinating emergency shelter services at Sanctuary for Families in New York City, serving as the co-chair of the Women of Color Committee at the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women's Network, working as the prevention and education manager at Friends of Battered Women and their Children (now called Between Friends), serving on the founding advisory board of the Women and Girls Collective Action Network (WGCAN) and being a member of Incite! Women of Color against Violence. Mariame was also a member of the editorial board of the journal Violence against Women from January 2003-December 2008. She is the co-editor [along with Michelle VanNatta] of a special issue of the journal about teen girls' experiences of and resistance to violence published in December 2007.
Mariame was the primary adult ally and co-founder of theRogers Park Young Women's Action Team. She has served on several boards and is proud to be a founding member and founding board chair of the Chicago Freedom School. Mariame considers herself above all to be a social justice educator. She has taught high school and college students in New York City and in Chicago. She has developed and taught courses about the history of black education, youth violence, urban education, and contemporary social issues at Northeastern Illinois University and at Northwestern University.
Mariame has written and published several articles and essays about urban education, youth leadership, and the significance of hair in the black community. She co-authored the Status of Girls in Illinois report along with Melissa Spatz and Michelle Vannatta. Most recently, Mariame has published a series of neighborhood-specific juvenile justice data snapshots and co-authored a report about juvenile arrests in Chicago titled "Arresting Justice" (with Caitlin Patterson).
Jamie Kalven
Jamie Kalven is a writer and human rights activist. He is the author of Working With Available Light: A Family’s World After Violence and the editor of A Worthy Tradition: Free Speech in America by his father Harry Kalven, Jr. He has reported extensively on police abuse in Chicago and was the plaintiff in Kalven v. Chicago, in which the Illinois appellate court ruled that documents bearing on allegations of police misconduct are public information.
Tracie L. Keesee
Tracie L. Keesee, PhD, is the project director of the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, a Department of Justice project led by the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College and designed to improve relationships and increase trust between minority communities and the criminal justice system, as well advance the public and scholarly understandings of the issues contributing to those relationships.
Dr. Keesee, a retired 25 year police veteran, is also the co-founder and director of research and community partnerships for the Center for Policing Equity, which promotes police transparency and accountability by facilitating innovative research collaborations between law enforcement agencies and empirical social scientists, and seeks to improve issues of equity–particularly racial and gender equity–in policing both within law enforcement agencies and between agencies and the communities they serve.
Dr. Keesee holds a BA in Political Science from Metropolitan State College, academic certifications in Public Policy and Public Administration from the University of Colorado at Denver, an MA in Criminal Justice from the University of Colorado at Denver, and a PhD from the University of Denver in Intercultural Communications. She is a graduate of the 203rd class of the FBI National Academy. Dr. Keesee has published several articles across a variety of collected anthologies and peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Chris King
Chris King is managing editor of The St. Louis American, which has been recognized by the Missouri Press Association as the best large weekly newspaper in Missouri the past two years. During the Ferguson crisis, he has been a frequent commentator on CNN, BBC World Service and many NPR affiliates, and his work on the story was profiled in The New Yorker. Previously he covered Connecticut for the New York Times, was travel editor for a magazine with a circulation of 1.1 million, and reviewed books for The Nation and Washington Post.
He is co-founder and creative director of Poetry Scores, which translates poetry into other media. The first record he co-produced for Poetry Scores, Crossing America by Leo Connellan, was featured on BBC Radio 3, and the second movie he directed for Poetry Scores, Go South for Animal Index, screened at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as part of the 2014 International Uranium Festival. He also writes poetry and fiction, co-translates poetry from other languages, and his work in these forms has been published in small magazines all over the world.
He was educated at Washington University, where he studied literature and philosophy and graduated with a master’s of arts degree in 1989; the Navy ROTC program at Boston University; and the public schools in Granite City, Illinois. He is married and the proud father of a daughter.
Chris Magnus
Chris Magnus has been the Police Chief of Richmond, California—a highly diverse, urban community of 110,000 residents in the San Francisco Bay Area—for the past 9 years. He has been significantly involved in strengthening ties between the community and its police force, addressing historically high levels of crime, and implementing reforms within the police department. Both violent and property crime in Richmond are currently at their lowest levels in over a decade. Chief Magnus is involved in regional community corrections efforts, improving services for victims of domestic and sexual violence, as well as a myriad of youth programs and activities.
Prior to taking the Richmond position, Magnus was the Police Chief of Fargo, North Dakota for 6 years where he played a key role in implementing the first two-state regional dispatch system in the nation, a forensic children’s interview center, and a refugee liaison program for the area’s many new immigrants and refugees.
Jonathan Masur
Jonathan Masur received a BS in physics and an AB in political science from Stanford University in 1999 and his JD from Harvard Law School in 2003. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for Chief Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. He taught at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law before joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2007. Masur received tenure in 2012. He served as Deputy Dean from 2012 to 2014 and as the Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar from 2011 to 2013. He was named the John P. Wilson Professor of Law in 2014.
His research and teaching interests include patent law, administrative law, behavioral law and economics, and criminal law.
Richard H. McAdams
Professor McAdams is the Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law and Aaron Director Research Scholar. He writes on criminal law and procedure, social norms, the expressive function of law, inequality, and law and literature. He is co-editor of the 2013 volume on Fairness in Law and Economics and the author of the forthcoming book,The Expressive Powers of Law. He has served as a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Panel for Law & Social Sciences, the editorial board of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, and the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association.
Before joining the Law School in 2007, McAdams taught on the law faculties at the University of Illinois, Boston University, and IIT Chicago-Kent. He was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and the Yale Law School and a visiting fellow at Australian National University. McAdams received his BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his JD from the University of Virginia. After graduation, he clerked for Chief Judge Harrison L. Winter of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and spent three years as an associate with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Philadelphia. McAdams teaches primarily in the areas of criminal law and procedure.
Howard Saffold
Reformer Howard Saffold, a former police officer who has dedicated his life to correcting wrongs in the criminal justice system, was born on January 26, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois, to Eva and DeWitt Saffold. Saffold held odd jobs while attending Farragut High School. Upon graduation in 1959, he joined the U.S. Army. He married Carol Randall Saffold in 1960 and completed his military service in 1962. Saffold worked as an expediter for the regional office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs before the Chicago Police Department hired him as a beat officer in 1965.
As a police officer, Saffold faced discrimination and witnessed police brutality, causing him to contemplate resigning. When the Afro-American Police League was founded in 1968 by Renault Robinson, he immediately joined, recruited others and eventually served as the League's president. When a 1976 court decision forced the Chicago Police Department to change its discriminatory hiring and promotional practices, membership soared. In 1978, Saffold co-founded the National Black Police Association, serving as its president as well. In 1979, he co-founded Positive Anti-Crime Thrust with fellow Afro-American Police League leader Renault Robinson; promoting cooperation between police and the communities they serve.
When Harold Washington unsuccessfully ran for mayor of the City of Chicago in 1977, Saffold provided security on a volunteer basis. When Washington ran again and won in 1983, one of Mayor Washington's first official acts was to name Saffold as chief of executive security, making Saffold responsible for selecting, training and assigning personnel. Saffold served in the same capacity for Mayor Eugene Sawyer after Mayor Washington's untimely death.
In 1991, Saffold retired from the Chicago Police Department and resurrected the Positive Anti-Crime Thrust. As CEO, he attempts to stem the flow of young black men into the prison system.
Saffold holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Chicago State University and an M.A. in urban studies from Northeastern Illinois University. He was honored by the Midwest Community Council in 1988, the Peoria Afro-American Police League in 1993 and the South Austin Coalition in 1994. He consults community organizing initiatives and community-based organizations, including prison ministries and public schools.
Carla Shedd
Carla Shedd is Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Columbia University. Shedd received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. Her research and teaching interests focus on: crime and criminal justice; race and ethnicity; law; inequality; and urban sociology. Shedd has been published in the American Sociological Review, Sociological Methods & Research, and she has also received fellowships from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Shedd’s first book, Unequal City: Race, Urban Schools, & Perceptions of Injustice (forthcoming Fall 2015, Russell Sage), focuses on Chicago public school students, and is a timely examination of race, place, education, and the expansion of the American carceral state. Shedd’s current research focuses on New York City investigating how young people’s linked institutional experiences influence their placement on and movement along the carceral continuum. Shedd is the Spring 2015 Scholar-in-Residence at the Vera Institute of Justice.
Margaret Beale Spencer
Margaret Beale Spencer is the Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education and Professor of Life Course Human Development at the University of Chicago in the Comparative Human Development Department. She is an alumna of the Committee on Human Development and earned her doctoral degree in child and developmental psychology. Before returning to Chicago, she held the inaugural Chair as the Board of Overseers Professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies of Human Development Program of the Psychology in Education Division in the Graduate School of Education at the University. At UPenn she directed two two research units: the Center for Health Achievement Neighborhoods Growth and Ethnic Studies (CHANGES), and was the inaugural director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Collective Research Institute. Spencer's Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) of human development serves as the foundation for her gendered and race-ethnicity acknowledging research emphasis, which addresses human vulnerability, resiliency, and identity and competence formation processes for diverse youth both in the United States and abroad.
In addition to Spencer's ongoing program of basic research, she frequently collaborates with groups for the purpose of applying the research findings to settings having a stated mission or purpose which addresses youths' emerging capacity for healthy outcomes and constructive coping methods. Given that the basic evaluation research activities of intervention collaborations occur in challenging contexts, the outcomes of the collaborations have significant implications for policy and for understanding not just the "what" or outcomes of human development but the "why" and "how" for achieving positive and healthy developmental trajectories. As a recursive scholarly orientation, the life-course identity development and coping process knowledge accrued have implications for Spencer's ongoing theory-building efforts as well as her basic program of scientific research.
Forrest Stuart
Forrest Stuart's research engages a fundamental and pressing concern for both sociological and criminological theory: how authorities attempt to more effectively control marginal social groups, and how those populations counteract and even resist such efforts. This theoretical agenda has resulted in three research projects. The first investigates the role of policing, criminal justice, and social welfare in the lives of marginalized and stigmatized urban communities. The second examines the unexpected resilience of the labor movement in Los Angeles. The third centers more explicitly on theory and methodology, exploring new ways of conceptualizing and studying urban poverty and crime.
Stuart's current book project is an in-depth ethnography of Los Angeles' Skid Row district, an area long regarded as the "homeless capital of America." Beginning in the early 2000s, Skid Row became distinguished as the site of one of the most aggressive broken windows policing campaigns to date, characterized by arguably the largest concentration of standing police forces found anywhere in the United States. Drawing on five years of fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, the project analyzes daily life on Skid Row's streets. Examining the interactions between police officers and the neighborhood's impoverished and homeless inhabitants, Stuart documents the emergence of a new model of urban social control that combines both rehabilitative and punitive interventions, what he terms "therapeutic policing." The project considers how this new configuration of social welfare, urban development, and criminal justice is re-constituting the meanings and contours of poverty, crime, and urban space, as well as the relationship existing between the police and the policed.
Jamel L. Triggs
Jamel L. Triggs is U.S. Marine veteran and active community leader, who has been involved with Blackstone Bicycle Works (BBW) since he was 14 years old. Blackstone Bicycle Works, often referred to as 'Blackstone Bikes', or simply 'Blackstone', is a youth education program of the Experimental Station. It's a bike shop dedicated to promoting ecological practices and empowering youth, teaching mechanical skills, job skills, and business literacy to boys and girls from the under-served Woodlawn neighborhood and Chicago's broader south side. Today, he serves Blackstone Bikes as their full-time Youth Mentor/Mechanical Instructor for young boys and girls alike.