Northern Arizona University

   

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Links to Faculty Project websites:

Northern Arizona Justice Project

Judicial Education Reference, Information, and Technical Assistance Project (JERITT)

Law Enforcement Command Institute of the Southwest

Graffiti Abatement Program in Tucson

Arizona Victim Assistance Academy -Contact Dr. Lynn Jones at 928-523-6701

Faculty Research:

Alexander Alvarez
Currently I am working on a book project with my co-author Ronet Bachman in which we examine various forms of collective and interpersonal violence. In this project we are trying to highlight some of the common themes which link different types of individual and group violence. I continue to study and write about genocide in a number of different settings and am a co-editor of the new journal Genocide Studies and Prevention, and also serve as a co-editor of the H-Genocide List Serve Discussion Network. I also have a number of future projects that I have tentatively begun. One focuses on examining the role of concentration camps in the modern era, while the other revolves around Native Peoples and genocide.

Cyndi Banks
I began my career in criminal justice as a probation officer in the Yukon Territory of Canada and was tasked to work with a group of Canadian First Nations people who lived north of the Arctic Circle. I found that I enjoyed working with indigenous peoples and a few years later I was able continue this interest when I traveled to Papua New Guinea to establish the Probation and Parole Service and formulate strategies for the development of that service for training and designed projects for juvenile justice diversion. I stayed for 13 years, working in probation, and parole training officers and then developing a career as a Research Fellow and Head of PNG Criminology Studies at the PNG National Research Institute. There I continued my interest in studying issues related to culture and crime researching the informal and formal justice systems in PNG and the position of women under the law which had been the focus for my both my masters and doctoral degrees.
I began my academic career in Alaska and developed an interest in juvenile justice, conducting qualitative research in a juvenile facility that housed Native Alaskans, which is the subject of a book manuscript to be published in 2008.  After coming to NAU I researched Native Americans and the law in the Flagstaff jail and juvenile facility and later became a consultant researching the juvenile justice system in Bangladesh where I was the Juvenile Justice and Gender specialist. Recently I spent 7 months of my sabattical in 2005 in Iraq where I was exposed to an Islamic legal system. In terms of law reform, as well as developing the probation and parole service of Papua New Guinea, my research helped me to design and implement strategies for juvenile justice reform in Bangladesh and to design and implement a project for an integrated criminal justice system in Iraq. This involved producing numerous manuals covering probation and parole practice and child protection for use by criminal justice agencies in Papua New Guinea and Bangladesh and in developing rule of law policies for human rights protection in an integrated justice system in Iraq.

Most recently in 2007, I worked for the UN in Southern Sudan and for the Ministry of Legal Affairs and Constitutional Development, where I designed and set up a Department of women and Juvenile Justice within the Ministry and developed 3 comprehensive training packages for judges and lawyers, police and prison officers, and the third one for social workers on juvenile justice based on the Child Bill for Southern Sudan and the international standards for children's rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I have been fortunate enough to travel a great deal as well as having lived and researched in the U.S. Canada, Papua New Guinea, England, Bangladesh and Iraq. My research experience has focused on policy development in the justice sector as well as integrating gender into the functions and activities of government. My academic work and my development work both have a strong gender focus. I have authored a book on criminology in developing countries and have published widely on criminological issues in those countries as well as on ethics and punishment in the U.S. My research interests include third world criminology, juvenile justice, international children’s rights, training and capacity building in justice systems, gender and crime, especially in the third world, justice policy development, human rights and justice ethics.

Dennis Catlin
As a former law enforcement officer and FBI Agent, I have been interested in the ethics of law enforcement and criminal justice personnel. My research focuses on the personal ethical orientations criminal justice personnel bring to the job and the impact indoctrination training and the subculture have on ethical orientation. My studies to date have looked at both law enforcement and judicial personnel. In law enforcement the studies have investigated the effect of both recruit training and subsequent exposure to the police subculture on personal ethical positions of police officers. These studies have suggested that over time ethical orientations are impacted by both initial training and the subculture. My current research looks at whether ethical orientations are related to ethical decision making as expressed by in series of hypothetical ethical dilemmas. Similar research with judicial personnel suggests that judicial personnel who serve in different roles in the court system have significantly different ethical orientations.

Michael Costelloe
My current research interests include: criminological theory; issues of social control; political economy; public attitudes toward crime, welfare, and immigration; and policing immigration. Current research projects include an examination of the influence of crime salience and economic insecurity on attitudes toward crime, welfare and immigration, immigration discourse as an example of moral panic, and a study of the expanding role of local and state police in the enforcement of federal immigration statutes.

Luis Fernandez
I received my Ph.D. from the School of Justice Studies and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University.  My research and teaching interests include protest policing, social movements, globalization, and issues in the social control of the late modernity.  My recent book, titled Policing Dissent: Social control and the Anti-Globalization Movement (2008, Rutgers University Press, www.policingdessent.info), used ethnographic data to analyze how law enforcement agencies police network-based mobilizations and movements.  My work also appears in various journals, including Social Justice and Qualitative Sociology.  My most resent research examines the securitization of Mexican-Guatemalan border as it links to US immigration policy.  Among the courses I teach are Global Justice, Law Enforcement Systems, and Research Methods.

Lynn Jones
My research emphasizes the legal profession and public interest law, social movements and activism, and crime victim services. I am currently engaged in the study of law and social movements, with particular emphasis on how cause lawyers negotiate their professional and activist identities and frame movement strategies. Other current projects include the study of campus sexual assault, minority crime victims, and barriers to campus victim services.

Over the last five years, I have worked closely with the Arizona Coalition for Victim Services to create, administer, and evaluate the Arizona Victim Assistance Academy. This Academy is a 40-hour training of victim advocates that aims to standardize and improve service delivery to the diverse crime victims in Arizona, with particular emphasis on overcoming the geographic and cultural barriers unique to this state. Prior to my work with this project in Arizona, I gained additional experience as co-principal investigator of the Pennsylvania Victim Assistance Academy. Both projects were initially funded through the Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime.

Raymond Michalowski
Most of my academic career has been focused on studying the relationships between law and justice on the one hand, and political and economic power on the other. While I have employed research tools ranging from advanced quantitative analyses to post-modernist modes of inquiry, in recent years I find my work relying most frequently on ethnographic and qualitative methods. Right now, two projects are particularly important to me.

One is a close-grained ethnographic exploration of the nature, goals, and strategies of social action groups concerned with immigration along the Arizona-Mexico border. As part of this research I am working with and/or observing a variety of social movement organizations. Some of these, such as the Border Action Network, No More Deaths, Samaritans, Derechos Humanos, Humane Borders and the Florence Project concerned with protecting and extending the rights of undocumented migrants from Mexico and nations further south. Others, such as the Minutemen and the Border Guardians are focused on sealing the U.S. border against further undocumented migration. My long-term goal is to both write about and perhaps develop a video documentary on the social and political struggles taking place over immigration in Southeastern Arizona.

My other current project involves continuing an inquiry begun in 2003 into the possible violations of international law associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This work extends the articles on the illegality of the Iraq war that I published with my colleague Ron Kramer in Social Justice and the British Journal of Criminology. I am currently examining the possible the violations of the U.N. Charter concerning state sovereignty, illegal attempts to convert the Iraq economy into a neo-liberal market system in violation of the Nuremburg Charter, and offenses in violations of the Geneva Convention, international humanitarian law and E.U. laws as they relate to the failure to protect citizens in a conquered country, unlawful detentions and torture at places such as Abu Grahib and Camp X-ray at Guantanamo, and the use of "renditions" to send suspected "enemy combatants" to be interrogated in countries known to use torture. 

Phoebe Morgan
I teach courses about women and justice, research methods and justice policy. Since 1991 my primary focus has regarded the problem of sexual harassment and I have published extensively on that topic. More recently, I have published analyses of gun control policy and I am currently developing a critique of the USA PATRIOT Act. I have experience with a wide array of research methods and have published the results from in-depth interviews, content analysis, population surveys and secondary analysis of public data. More recently I have been developing a methodology for collecting and analyzing images. I have presented the results of pilot studies at international conferences and intend to publish a book about this cutting edge approach to empirical inquiry. 

Marianne O. Nielsen
I do research in the area of Native Americans and the criminal justice system, and have expanded this to investigate comparative Indigenous criminal justice in other countries, mainly Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I have three books out in the area: Aboriginal Peoples and Canadian Criminal Justice (edited with Robert A. Silverman), Native Americans, Crime and Criminal Justice (also edited with Robert A. Silverman) and Navajo Nation Peacemaking (edited with James W. Zion), and will have another one appearing soon.  I've also had numerous journal articles and book chapters published. Because of this interest, I teach a graduate course on “World Indigenous Peoples and Justice” and our undergraduate course on “Investigating Difference”. I also do research on the structure, operation and ideologies of criminal justice organizations. My other teaching interests are primarily in the area of media and crime. I teach two undergraduate courses on “Media, Crime and Justice” and “Hollywood and the Social Construction of Crime and Justice.

Linda Robyn
Issues of social justice have always been central to my research, and I have approached my work through a critical perspective of criminology. My interests include State/Corporate Crime, Environmental Justice and Indigenous Peoples, American Indians and the Criminal Justice System, and Wrongful Conviction. My current research focuses on State/Corporate Crime and the relationship between uranium mining on American Indian reservations which has resulted in devastating environmental and health issues.  I continue to work with the Northern Arizona Justice Project.

Robert Schehr
My primary research interests center around the study of the causes of wrongful conviction. This has manifested in: a) scholarly research addressing wrongful and unlawful conviction from an international human rights and transnational perspective; and b) research on the Criminal Cases Review Commission in the UK. In addition, I am the Director of the Northern Arizona Justice Project (NAJP), an actual innocence project that investigates cases where actual innocence is alleged. 

Neil Websdale
My current research work involves writing a book entitled Killing Them All: Understanding Familicide, due to be published by OUP in 2008/2009.

Nancy Wonders
My research and teaching focuses on the relationship between social inequality, difference, and justice, with an emphasis on the experiences of underrepresented and vulnerable populations. My current research project is international and comparative; it explores the relationship between globalization, (im)migration, inequality, and justice in several border regions. As part of this work, I have conducted global ethnographic fieldwork focusing on sex tourism in The Netherlands and, more recently, on gendered migration to Spain and the growing criminalization of border crossers throughout the West. I am currently examining shifting border constructions in the U.S., with a focus on the way that law, policy, and justice practices reflect and reinforce gender, class, racial, religious, and other identity differences. I am particularly interested in the criminal justice and social justice experiences of recent border crossers. I am also actively involved in local and regional research on justice practices and policies, in collaboration with the NAU Social Research Laboratory. I have conducted quantitative research as an evaluator for courts in Arizona; I have also engaged in regionally relevant qualitative research, conducting interviews and focus groups with diverse populations such as domestic violence survivors, Native America youth, and court personnel.