Graduate Sociology at SUNY Albany

Area of Specialization: Crime & Deviance

The Department of Sociology at the University at Albany has a rich tradition of educating graduate students in the study of deviance and crime. Professors Kecia Johnson, Joanne Kaufman, Ryan King, and Steven Messner conduct research and teach courses primarily in the deviance, law, and criminology areas, and Professor Glenn Deane is actively engaged in the development and application of statistical techniques that are of particular interest to quantitative criminologists. Professor Marvin Krohn, School of Criminal Justice, is an affiliated member of the department. In addition, several departmental colleagues specialize in related fields, such as urban sociology, social demography, and social stratification. Given these distinctive strengths, the department offers graduate students an opportunity to work with faculty on a diverse array of topics on crime and deviance.

The high faculty-to-students ratio provides the context in which a true mentorship relationship between students and faculty can be fostered. It is common for faculty who do research in the area of deviance and crime to include graduate students in their research, which often results in joint authorship. Such joint endeavors not only provide the student with invaluable experience, but also generate the type of resumes that have been increasingly attractive to potential employers. Albany Ph.D.’s who have chosen deviance/crime as their major area of concentration have done quite well on the job market.

Another advantage of studying deviance/crime at the University at Albany is the presence of the School of Criminal Justice. Students can supplement their program with courses focusing on aspects of the criminal justice system taught by a nationally recognized faculty. The quality of the program is enhanced by the fact that it is housed in a department that has earned national recognition in recent years as being among the leaders in scholarly research. The quality and diversity of education offered in the Department of Sociology generally, and in the area of deviance/crime specifically, make Albany an exciting place at which to continue your education.

The Program

The graduate program is designed to provide a basic core of courses in theory, methods and statistics while allowing for flexibility in the area of deviance/crime. The student pursuing a Ph.D. is required to take two sociological theory courses, and three methods/statistics courses. SOC 601, Social Deviance, is typically the first course in the deviance/crime sequence. It provides an in-depth examination of the major theoretical perspectives in the area. SOC 602, Research Issues in Deviant Behavior, continues this exploration by focusing on research that has examined these perspectives.

Having provided a basic background in the area, the program is designed to utilize the particular strengths of our faculty. The program offers a variety of specialized courses exploring issues in which the faculty has special expertise. For example, in recent years Professor Messner has offered seminars on Macro-Sociological Approaches to Crime and Delinquency and on Markets, Morality and Crime. Professor Johnson currently teaches courses on the Sociology of Deviant Behavior; Gender, Crime and Justice; and the Sociology of Gender. Professor King has offered seminars on Law and Society in addition to a graduate course on Crime and Social Control, both of which discuss state responses to deviance. Professor Kaufman currently teaches courses on Juvenile Delinquency and Race/Ethnicity and Crime.

Recent Ph.D. Recipients in Crime and Deviance

Numerous graduates of the deviance and crime program within sociology now occupy important positions in the field. Graduates from the program include:

• Rob Baller, Iowa University
• Eric Baumer, University of Missouri- St. Louis
• Mark Beaulieu, University of Hartford
• Paul Bellair, Ohio State University
• Jon Bernburg, Icelandic Research Council
• Lory Collins Hall, Hartwick College
• Tony Hoskin, California State University, Bakersfield
• Sung Joon Jang, Lousiana State
• John King, FBI
• Jianhong Liu, Rhode Island College
• Fred Markowitz, Northern Illinois University
• Tom McNulty, University of Georgia
• Ben Pearson-Nelson, Indiana-Purdue University
• Mark Reed, Georgia State University
• Eric Silver, Penn. State University
• Jukka Savolainen, National Inst. Of Legal Policy, Finland
• Brian Stults, University of Florida
• Kim Tobin, Westfield State College
• Bonnie Veysey, Rutgers University
• Rachel Whaley, Western Michigan University
• Lening Zhang, St. Francis College
  

Faculty in Deviance and Crime

Glenn D. Deane
Ph.D. Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Professor Deane is a frequent collaborator on deviance and crime research and occasionally serves on dissertation committees in these areas. His contributions to the study of deviance and crime are primarily in research methodology, including residual dependence, missing value imputation, spatial dependence, and panel data analysis. Recent papers include the use of marginal logit modeling to explore offense specialization and racial differences in violent offending; log-multiplicative association models for imputing missing victim/offender relationship in SHR data; spatial regression and multilevel modeling with alternative covariance structures on county- and city-level homicide rates; and an application of spline regression with an unknown number and location of knots to identify structural breaks in city-level homicide rates during the 1980s and ‘90s.

Kecia Johnson
Ph.D. North Carolina State University

Professor Johnson’s research examines how race and gender inequality influence crime and delinquency. One area of interest seeks to further understand the collateral consequences of incarceration for individuals and communities. A current project focuses on the impact of incarceration on employment and earnings trajectories of African Americans, Latinos, and whites. In addition, this line of research addresses the question whether high rates of imprisonment for community residents influence crime rates and housing property values. A second area of research explores the relationship between schools and delinquency. This area of study considers the extent to which stratification and disciplinary practices within schools and individual-level characteristics affect delinquency, with an emphasis on how delinquent behavior varies across race and gender.

Joanne M. Kaufman
Ph.D. Emory University

Professor Kaufman’s research focuses on how social psychological processes illuminate the causes of criminal and deviant behavior. While drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, her primary interests involve the impact of general strain and social learning processes on various outcomes including violence, substance use, identity development, and emotional experience and expression. Much of this research emphasizes how various inequalities (race/ethnicity, socioeconomic, gender, power) and/or social context affect these social psychological processes to produce differential outcomes. She has conducted both qualitative and quantitative research with a variety of data sources and is currently analyzing the Add Health data. Professor Kaufman’s research has been published in sociological, criminological, and public health journals.

Ryan King
Ph.D. University of Minnesota

Professor King’s research lies at the intersection of law, criminology, and inter-group conflict. Presently, he is investigating the implementation and enforcement of hate crime policies in the United States and Germany, giving particular attention to the respective roles of collective memories and nation-specific institutional arrangements in the law-making and enforcement processes. King’s other work, both past and present, largely falls into three overlapping categories. First, he conducts research on the impact of politics and academic organization on criminological knowledge production. Current research in that vein investigates how politics and racial dynamics of communities contribute to punitive practices in the U.S. A second strand of research seeks to explain anti-Semitism in the contemporary U.S. and anti-Jewish laws and violence in Europe before the Holocaust. Third, his work looks at crime trajectories and the role of social institutions such as the family on the onset and cessation of crime over the life course. Current work on that theme investigates alternative econometric models in the study of marriage and crime.

Marvin Krohn
Ph.D. Florida State University

Professor Krohn’s research has primarily focused on the causes of adolescent substance use and juvenile delinquency. He has published several research articles examining hypotheses derived from social control and social learning theories. He has explored the possibility of integrating the main ideas of these perspectives into a social network theory of delinquency. He is currently examining some of the implications of his approach in a panel study of inner city adolescents, the Rochester Youth Development Study. This study followed a sample of adolescents into early adulthood and is currently gathering data on their children as well. In addition to numerous articles published in scholarly journals, he is a co-author of Delinquent Behavior and Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective, and co-editor of Theoretical Integration in the Study of Deviance and Crime and Taking Stock of Delinquency. Professor Krohn is the recipient of the University at Albany President’s Award and the State University’s Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is former Vice-President of the American Society of Criminology. He recently received the American Society of Criminology’s Michael J. Hindelang Award for Outstanding Scholarshipfor his co-authored book entitled, Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective.

Steven Messner
Ph.D. Princeton University

Professor Messner has conducted research on the relationship between features of social organization and crime rates with data for a variety of areal units, including neighborhoods, metropolitan communities, counties, and nation–states. In collaboration with Richard Rosenfeld, he has been developing and testing “institutional-anomie theory.” He is also engaged in research on crime in China, the spatial patterning of crime, and the interconnections between social capital and crime. Professor Messner’s work has been published in the major sociological and criminological journals. He is co-author of Crime and the American Dream, Perspectives on Crime and Deviance, and Criminology: Using MicroCase ExplorIt, and is co-editor of Theoretical Integration in the Study of Deviance and Crime and Crime and Social Control in a Changing China. Professor Messner is a recipient of the University at Albany’s President’s Award for Excellence in Research, the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the President’s Award for Excellence in Academic Service, and the State University of New York Research Foundation’s Award for Research and Scholarship. He is a fellow of the American Society of Criminology.

-From 2007 Brochure