Irvine Lab for the Study of Space and Crime
Congratulations to lab member Xiaoshuang Iris Luo, who received the Smith-Pontell Award from the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine in spring 2023! This award is for overall outstanding accomplishments as a graduate student. Great work by Iris, who will be on the job market in the Fall 2023.
Third places like bodegas and barbershops promote community well-being. “Respondents in neighborhoods with more third places report higher levels of interaction with their neighbors and greater cohesion, an effect that is most prominent in low-income neighborhoods.” That was a key result in a paper led by ILSSC alum Seth Williams. He summarizes the results of this research on the Vital City website. Read the article here.
[Read more…] about Lab publication on Third Places and social cohesionHow to Think about Criminal Justice Reform: Conceptual and Practical Considerations, by Charis E. Kubrin and Rebecca Tublitz
How can we improve the effectiveness of criminal justice reform efforts? Effective reform hinges on shared understandings of what the problem is and shared visions of what success looks like. But consensus is hard to come by, and there has long been a distinction between “policy talk” or how problems are defined and solutions are promoted, and “policy action” or the design and adoption of certain policies. In this essay, we seek to promote productive thinking and talking about, as well as designing of, effective and sustainable criminal justice reforms. To this end, we offer reflections on underlying conceptual and practical considerations relevant for both criminal justice policy talk and action.
Read the full article here: https://rdcu.be/c1ZJS
Congratulations to graduate student Rebecca Tublitz who successfully defended her dissertation prospectus titled, “Pretrial Policy Change and Place: Evaluating the Impacts of Bail Reform in Maryland.”
Lab co-director Dr. John R. Hipp has released a new book. In it he notes that a characteristic of many crime incidents is that they happen at a particular spatial location and a point in time. These two simple insights suggest the need for both a spatial and a longitudinal perspective in studying crime events. The spatial question focuses on why crime seems to occur more frequently in some locations than others, and the consequences of this for certain areas of cities, or neighborhoods. The longitudinal component focuses on how crime impacts, and is impacted by, characteristics of the environment. This book looks at where offenders, targets, and guardians might live, and where they might spatially travel throughout the environment, exploring how vibrant neighborhoods are generated, how neighborhoods change, and what determines why some neighborhoods decline over time while others avoid this fate.
—WINNER of the 2023 James Short Senior Scholar Award for best book or paper published, from the Division of Communities and Place in the American Society of Criminology—
Read more about the book from Dr. John R. Hipp here.
[Read more…] about Lab publication: Book on The Spatial Scale of Crime
