Christopher Uggen, "Fluidity and Stickiness in Crime, Punishment, and Inequality"

Date: 

Monday, December 15, 2014, 12:00pm to 1:45pm

Location: 

Harvard Kennedy School: Allison Dining Room

Christopher Uggen, Distinguished McKnight Professor of Sociology and Law, University of Minnesota.

Contemporary criminology offers compelling evidence that the distinction between “criminal” and “non-criminal” is largely a matter of time.Yet crime discourse and policy remain rooted in the notion of criminality as an immutable individual characteristic.

This talk contrasts the fluidity in criminal behavior with the growing stickiness of public labels,drawing from an experimental study of low-level criminal records, demographic analysis of the population bearing such records, and their spillover effects on health care and other institutions.

After summarizing key U.S. policy interventions on stigmatization and crime, I conclude by introducing a new study of restorative alternatives in a radically different legal and social context.

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About the speaker: Chris Uggen is Distinguished McKnight Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Minnesota.

He studies crime, law, and deviance, firm in the belief that good science can light the way to a more just and peaceful world.

His writing appears in American Sociological ReviewAmerican Journal of SociologyCriminology, and Law & Society Review and featured in media such as the New York TimesThe Economist,and NPR.

With Jeff Manza, he wrote Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy.

His interests include punishment and reentry, citizenship, substance use, discrimination, and health inequalities.

His outreach and engagement projects include editing Contexts Magazine (from 2007-2011) and The Society Pages (with Doug Hartmann) and Public Criminologies (with Michelle Inderbitzin). 

He was recently named a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and was an invited speaker in the 2013 White House parental incarceration forum.

Paper