Congrats to lab member Cheyenne Hodgen, who was the recipient of the 2025 Gil Geis Award from the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine. This award recognizes excellence in research by a graduate student. Cheyenne received it for her research publications, including one as lead author and one as co-author published in Criminology. Congrats Cheyenne!
Three lab members defend dissertation prospectuses!
Congratulations to lab members Cheyenne Hodgen, Kyle Winnen, and Yuki Wang, all of whom successfully defended their dissertation prospectuses this spring, 2025.
Cheyenne’s dissertation project is titled, “Understanding Criminal Opportunity: Environmental Design, Routine Activities, and Temporal Patterns of Crime.”
Kyle’s dissertation project is titled, “The Subjective Experience of Inequality: Developing Critical Harm Theory to Examine How Social Structure and Culture Impact Violence, Social Reactions to Harm, and Civic Participation.”
Yuki Wang. Yuki’s dissertation project is titled, “Crime mobility and Spatial preferences: A Comparative Analysis through the Lens of Offender-centric Theories to Understand Victimization”.
Congratulations Dr. Tublitz!
Congratulations to lab member Rebecca Tublitz who successfully defended her dissertation on bail reform in Maryland this spring, 2025, and will be graduating in June.
Across three studies, Rebecca examines Maryland’s statewide bail reform to evaluate its effects on judicial decision-making and public safety, and to investigate how local court contexts shape pretrial outcomes. In the 1st study, she employs a regression discontinuity analysis to evaluate how bail reform affects judicial decision-making at the pretrial stage. In the 2nd study, she investigates the impact of bail reform on crime using a synthetic control group approach. In the final study, using multilevel modeling techniques, she analyzes how pretrial decision-making varies across court jurisdictions and explores how the social contexts of courts shape responses to new law.
Dr. Tublitz will continue conducting policy-related research at the Institute for State and Local Governance at the City University of New York.
Lab publication on nonlinear relationship between immigrant concentration and crime
A recent publication by lab directors Kubrin and Hipp, and alum Iris Luo explores the nonlinear relationship between immigrant concentration and crime. Consistent with much existing research generally finding that the presence of more immigrants in neighborhoods is associated with lower crime rates, this study using data from neighborhoods across the U.S. in the new National Incident Crime Study (NICS) found not only a negative relationship, but that it was nonlinear. One notable finding was that at higher concentrations of immigrants, the robbery rate begins increasing; however, this pattern was not found for any other types of crime. Given the results from earlier research showing that immigrants can be targets for this type of crime given that they are more likely to be carrying cash, the evidence seems to point towards their greater victimization in these circumstances. Additional tests in the paper came to the same conclusion that victimization is what characterizes the unique robbery results. The paper is now published in the British Journal of Criminology and can be found here: “Immigration and Crime: Is the Relationship Nonlinear?”
The graphs below show the difference in results for aggravated assault and robbery, highlighting the likelihood of increased victimization in high immigrant concentration neighborhoods.
Three new lab PhDs! Sola, Luo, and Forthun
Congrats to three of our lab members who successfully defended their dissertations this spring, 2024, and are off to bigger and better things at their new jobs.
Justin Sola defended his dissertation “Theory with Consequents”, and will now be an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in the sociology department. Go Tar Heels!
Xiaoshuang Iris Luo defended her dissertation “Crime Changes and Spatial Patterns: Examination of Longitudinal Models of Crime across Multiple Cities in the U.S.”, and will now be an Assistant Professor at Akron University in the department of Criminal Justice Studies.
Benjamin Forthun defended his dissertation “Won’t You Be My Neighbor? An Examination of Environmental Context, Resident Neighborhood Spatial Perceptions, and Implications for Aggregate Techniques”, and will now be an Assistant Professor at the University of Northern Colorado in the department of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
