Dear Friends of the National Institute —
The recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other people of color by police have triggered massive, ongoing demonstrations against police violence and for racial justice across the entire country. Awareness of this persistent historical problem seems to have reached a new level across society, with huge numbers of previously disengaged or disinterested people joining the protests and many state and local governments seriously reviewing limits on police activity, funding, and authority, often for the first time.
Please join us for a fascinating and informative virtual discussion forum featuring three outstanding scholars who study policing and the criminal justice system from the diverse disciplines of law, criminology, economics, and sociology as they discuss the sources of and potential solutions to the current crisis of policing in this country.
We expect this to be an incredibly timely and important discussion of one of the most pressing problems in American society today, and we invite you to join us as we search for answers.
Thursday, July 23, 2020
4:00 to 5:30 pm ET (US and Canada)
This forum is sponsored by the National Institute of Social Sciences and is free and open to the general public. In order to attend, you must click the link above to register in advance for the event. The event will be recorded for those who cannot attend it live.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Fred Larsen
President, Board of Trustees
Panelists:
Tracey Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor and a Founding Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. Before joining the faculty at Yale, she was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 1995 to 2007, serving as Max Pam Professor and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice. She was the first African American woman to be granted tenure at both law schools. Professor Meares is a nationally recognized expert on policing in urban communities. Her research focuses on understanding how members of the public think about their relationship(s) with legal authorities such as police, prosecutors and judges. She teaches courses on criminal procedure, criminal law, and policy and she has worked extensively with the federal government. In April 2019, Professor Meares was elected as a member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In December 2014, President Obama named her as a member of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
Emily Owens is a Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics, and is a senior research fellow at the National Police Foundation in Washington, DC. Professor Owens studies a wide range of topics in the economics of crime, including policing, sentencing, and the impact of local public policies on criminal behavior. Her research examines how government policies affect the prevalence of criminal activity as well as how agents within the criminal justice system, particularly police, prosecutors, and judges, respond to policy changes. Professor Owens received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland-College Park. Prior to joining the faculty at UCI, Professor Owens held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Victor Rios is Associate Dean of Social Science and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005. His research agenda focuses on the role of social control in determining the well-being of young people living in poverty; tracking the social consequences of the punitive practices and punitive social control, across institutional settings; and examining young people’s resilience and responses to social marginalization. He is the author of Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York University Press 2011) and Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth (University of Chicago Press 2017). Rios is currently writing a book, Opportunity Gaps: Teacher Support, Race, and The Future of Public Education, based on a recently completed two-year study at a large, racially and economically diverse Southern California high school. Rios participated in The Joyce Foundation DC convening on gun violence, policing and mass incarceration at the Obama White House in 2015.