Email: eallensocialphd@gmail.com

Website: http://www.drelizabethallen.org/

I bring more than 25 years of clinical experience with justice-involved women and other marginalized groups. I am tenaciously committed to smart decarceration research, policy, and practice and throughout my career aimed to embrace what academia together with activism can offer change-agents and guide and support radical social change.

My dissertation research was an inquiry into redemptive narratives and the distance process for justIce-involved women with the goal of adding to the knowledge base of desistance, advocating for policies and interventions that support the process of distance and promoting a unifying framework to bridge micro and macro approaches with vulnerable and marginalized populations. Currently, I am a PI on a CBPR project using Photovoice with the urban youth with the lived experience of parental incarceration.

The synthesis of my clinical and research experience prepares me for the dual role of researcher and policy-maker and utilizing evidence to advance policy and practice. My research interests are vast and include the intersection of micro and macro issues amplified within criminal justice systems including racial, gender and economic justice and human rights.

PROFESSOR, ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR DOCTORAL EDUCATION, DENVER UNIVERSITY

Email: kimberly.bender@du.edu

Website: https://socialwork.du.edu/about/gssw-directory/kimberly-ann-bender 

Professor Kimberly Bender serves as Associate Dean for Doctoral Education. Her recent research includes a study of gender-specific pathways from childhood maltreatment to juvenile delinquency among youth in the child welfare system. Bender’s research aims to improve services and develop empirically based interventions for adolescents at risk of problem behavior. She recently contributed to an intervention research project on methods for engaging runaway youth in substance-use treatment funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse.

DOCTORAL CANDIDATE

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO

Email: jbonsu2@uic.edu

Bio: I am a doctoral candidate at Jane Addams College of Social Work, activist, and restorative justice practitioner. My work is based in an intersectional and structural analysis. My current work interrogates the intersection of gender-based violence, policing, and survivor empowerment; building and sustaining models of transformative justice; and policies that directly impact incarcerated people and their families.

DOCTORAL CANDIDATE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY

Email: britabookser@berkeley.edu

Website: https://socialwelfare.berkeley.edu/people/phd-students

Brita A. Bookser’s research interests include early care and education, education policy, carceral logics in education, feminist anti-carceral studies, womanism, and critical race theory. Her research-praxis agenda is facilitated by varied agency partnerships that explore policies and pedagogies for inclusion and civic engagement. Bookser’s qualitatively-driven mixed-method dissertation explores a typology of exclusionary discipline measures in preschools and examines how structural factors influence exclusionary tactics in early care and education settings.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR DOCTORAL AND POST-DOCTORAL EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND 

Email: cbright@ssw.umaryland.edu

My research focuses on populations and services within the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, with specific interests in gender, trauma, and implementation of best practices

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE

Email: rachel.casey@maine.edu

Website: https://usm.maine.edu/swo/rachel-casey-phd-msw

Rachel earned her MSW and PhD from the School of Social Work at Virginia Commonwealth University. Rachel conducts research across methodologies to illuminate the unique experiences of incarcerated women, aiming to improve the responsiveness of mental health programs in correctional settings. Rachel is also passionate about teaching and has taught courses in research methods, human behavior in the social environment, and social justice. Regardless of subject matter, Rachel strives to engage students in dynamic learning experiences which help them develop a critical perspective and acquire essential knowledge and skills for competent, reflexive social work practice.

GRADUATE STUDENT, UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT

Email: Dominique.Courts@uconn.edu

Website: https://ssw.uconn.edu/person/c-l-dominique-courts-ma-mft/#

After graduating from NYU with a bachelor’s degree in Applied Psychology with a concentration in Social and Cultural Analysis, Dominique Courts, MA, MFT, earned a clinical master’s degree in Human Development and Family Studies with a specialization in Marriage and Family Therapy at UCONN. Following her work as a therapist, Dominique is now a Crandall-Cordero fellow at The UCONN School of Social Work and invested in affecting change on an institutional and systems level.

As a doctoral student, she is particularly interested in using a reproductive and healing justice framework to understand the healing process for people, who live with intersecting marginalized identities, especially lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual and queer individuals of color. The lack of visibility and research around LGBTQ people of color led her to be passionate about conducting mixed-methods and participatory action research to explore various aspects of their lived experiences. Ultimately, Dominique desires to amplify the voices of marginalized populations in her research and use collaborative and empowering research methods and accessible dissemination techniques.

Throughout the CT community, Dominique also facilitates workshops and groups focused on relationships, LGBTQ identities and other topics related to social justice and healing. She centers the lived experiences and needs of the individuals at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender and ability in her research, teaching, clinical and community work and advocacy.

PROFESSOR, VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

Email: ecramer@vcu.edu

Website: https://www.socialwork.vcu.edu/about/our-team/elizabeth-p-cramer-phd-lcsw.html

My recent scholarship has been in the area of abuse of people with disabilities. I am currently the PI on a project to make family abuse protective orders more accessible for abused persons with disabilities and to train disability service professionals to assist consumers who have experienced domestic or sexual violence. I am the co-PI on a project to provide information about healthy relationships to persons with developmental and other disabilities. I have also written about criminal justice responses to intimate partner violence.

ASSISTANT DEAN FOR RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Email: dana.dehart@sc.edu

Website: http://cosw.sc.edu/faculty/dana-dehart

Dr. DeHart’s specialty area is violence and victimization. She has been Principal Investigator on many grants and contracts addressing issues such as victimization and survivor services, impact of incarceration on families, gendered pathways to adult and juvenile offending, mental health and substance abuse, and predatory sexual behavior. Dr. DeHart has expertise in a range of qualitative and quantitative methods and has conducted hundreds of interviews with adult and juvenile offenders, crime victims, justice professionals, and human-service providers. Dr. DeHart is experienced in needs assessment, program evaluation, scale design, and ethical research design.

DEAN OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, ALLIED AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

Email: Drpattydrown@yahoo.com

PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL WORK, COURSE CO-ORDINATOR, ACADEMY OF PRISONS & CORRECTIONAL ADMINISRATION, INDIA

Email: beulahyesus@gmail.com

Website: www.apca.tn.nic.in

My area of interest is in teaching and research on the mental health of prison inmates. I train the Prison Officers on the various issues like human rights and issues on Women Prisoners. I do prisoners development programmes. I train the Prison Officers on soft skills too. My passion is research in Prisons. I am a certified trainer of Penal Rfeorms International and I co-ordinate the training with many national and international organisations and I was a Member of the Prison Advisory Board.

VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, COLLEGE OF SAINT ROSE

Email: espinozl@strose.edu

Liz Espinoza has forensic social work experience at state government level in NY.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SERVICE ADMINISTRATION

Email: gfedock@uchicago.edu

Website: https://ssa.uchicago.edu/ssascholars/g-fedock

Gina Fedock is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Service Administration. Her work focuses on improving women’s mental health and spans the boundaries of public health, criminal justice, law, and social work. Her research includes implementing, testing, and evaluating interventions that are designed to improve the quality of women’s health in the community and within correctional settings. In addition, her work expands a trauma-informed framework of understanding and addressing women’s health needs. She integrates women’s experiences of gender-based violence, such as sexual violence and intimate partner violence, into her research. Through a human rights framework, her work incorporates advocacy for addressing social injustices in order to improve women’s health and wellbeing.

Currently, she is working on several studies, including examining women’s experiences of staff sexual misconduct in prisons and on parole and investigating racial and gender disparities in suicide attempts by prisoners. Through a faculty grant from the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, she is investigating how human rights standards influence women’s imprisonment.

Her research is in journals such as: Trauma, Violence, & Abuse; Cognitive and Behavioral Practice; Research on Social Work Practice; Journal of Interpersonal Violence; and the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, CRIMINAL JUSTICE STUDIES, SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY

Email: cgallo@sfsu.edu

Bio: My scholarship addresses historical and international trends in crime and welfare policies, with particular attention to how policies and laws intending to support underrepresented and marginalized groups have developed over the last century. I am especially interested in the “criminalization” of poverty and the penalization of vulnerable populations. One of my recent research projects examines how categories in crime policy, such as the “crime victim,” have crossed over to welfare law and policy. The study shows how new categories can change the way policy makers and practitioners conceptualize social problems, in particular, poverty and inequality.​ I’m currently working on a book exploring the roots of the Swedish victim movement. This book is vital to informing the literature how different societies have approached issues related to crime and victims.

I am also a trained social worker. Before entering academia, I worked with many different actors involved in the criminal justice system. For instance, between 2001 and 2006 I was the director of a nongovernmental victim support center, which provides services to over 500 crime victims per year.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, FORDHAM UNIVERSITY

Email: goldkind@fordham.edu

Website: https://www.fordham.edu/info/24281/gss_full-time_faculty_profiles/11298/lauri_goldkind

Dr. Goldkind has a longstanding interest and practice background in nonprofit leadership, capacity building and organizational development. Her practice experience has been centered in the youth development, education and juvenile justice realms. Prior to joining the faculty at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, she served as the Director of the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services’ (CASES) School Connection Center, a public school admissions office for youth exiting the justice system. She was instrumental in developing the Center’s operational infrastructure, including creating and maintaining all data systems and documenting the Center’s progress. She also helped craft policy and develop data management applications at Community Prep High School, a school for young people transitioning back to their communities from the juvenile justice system. Before that she held program planning and fund raising positions at agencies serving young people in New York City, including the Posse Foundation, where she was the first director of development.

​Dr. Goldkind’s current research work centers on the intersection of the juvenile justice and public education system’s impact on urban youth. She is presently conducting a national study of school social workers exploring their role in the school re-entry process of juvenile justice youth. Dr. Goldkind is also interested in domestic trafficking issues and is partnering with the Girls Education Mentoring Services (GEMS) to document their programmatic model and highlight the complex and unexplored issues of girls who are commercially sexually exploited.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

Email: sara.goodkind@pitt.edu

Website: https://www.socialwork.pitt.edu/people/sara-goodkind

Dr. Goodkind’s research and scholarship focus on marginalized youth and the inequities they experience. Much of her work examines social service programs and systems that work with young people, concentrating on young people’s experiences in educational, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems and how these systems both construct and meet the needs of the young people they serve. Dr. Goodkind developed her scholarly interests as a result of working with youth, as a teacher, mentor, facilitator, and social worker. She utilizes a critical perspective in her work to examine understandings of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age that shape service design and delivery and then to explore the effects of this service provision, with the aim of ensuring that interventions are culturally relevant, gender responsive, fair, and effective. Dr. Goodkind’s research also focuses on institutional biases and systemic inequities, tracing young people’s pathways through systems and providing evidence and advocacy for much-needed policy change. Much of this work is via community-based participatory research projects that engage youth as collaborators in effecting systemic change.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, STONYBROOK UNIVERSITY

Email: Anna.hayward@stonybrook.edu

Website: https://socialwelfare.stonybrookmedicine.edu/faculty-staff/hayward

DIRECTOR OF PRACTICE IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION, NORTHEAST OHIO MEDICAL UNIVERSITY

Email: dhrouda@neomed.edu

Focus on the implementation of evidence-based, best, and emerging practices for people along the continuum of justice involvement.

EDITOR

Email: russimmarigeon@fairpoint.net

Editor of national publications on community corrections, alternatives to prison, and offender programming. Editor of 4 books on crime desistance, prisoner reentry, and women and girls in the criminal justice system. Independent researcher on the overuse of incarceration for women and others, and of cash bail in pretrial settings.