My primary research broadly focuses on race and ethnicity, law and society, gender and sexuality, social movements, and the criminal-legal regulation of sex crimes in North America. My research has resulted in funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and Law & Society Dissertation Grant, several first author peer-reviewed publications, a dozen conference paper presentations, and awards from major organizations including the American Sociological Association.

Legal Decision-Making, Sex Exceptionalism, and Identity

In my dissertation and current book project, “It’s Worse Than Murder”: The Sex Crime Mercy Carve-Out in the Age of Progressive Prosecution, I use interviews with people working in the criminal legal system in California, incarceration data collected from state departments of corrections, and an analysis of historical movements in the U.S. to explore why progressive prosecutors in U.S. sex crime cases adopt similar stances to tough-on-crime prosecutors that disproportionately harm people of color, and how progressive prosecutors rationalize these decisions. After the 1960s Warren Court expanded rights for defendants in U.S. criminal cases, countervailing campaigns to change the criminal legal system proliferated—progressive activists fighting for mercy and attention to inequalities, and Victims’ Rights Advocates and tough-on-crime conservatives fighting for harsher punishments. However, sex crime cases remain shaped by what legal scholar Aya Gruber terms “sex exceptionalism”—a view of sex offenders as being uniquely beyond reform.

My research reveals that (1) while U.S. sex crime cases are demographically whiter than non-sex crime cases, race- and gender-based biases persist in unique ways at the intersection of race and gender, with Indigenous women disproportionately incarcerated, (2) prosecutors reframe sex crime prosecutions as inherently just through positioning themselves as victims’ advocates alleviating gender inequality within a progressive framework, and (3) prosecutors use sociolegal jargon to justify punitive decisions in sex crime cases, especially targeting accused sex offenders from marginalized racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. Ultimately, my research challenges the idea that “inequality” is an effective frame for progressive prosecution movements and contradicts existing assumptions in sociological literature that sex crime prosecutions are less susceptible to race-, gender-, and class-based bias.

Additionally, my research published in Sociology Compass revealed that contrary to assertions in previous sociological research, Black people experience higher arrest odds for reported sex crimes in the U.S. Further, the effect of Blackness on arrest odds is exacerbated by sex — it is higher for those labeled “female” or “other,” and lower for those labeled “male.” I argue this reflects how race constructs non-male bodies as masculine and how cultural understandings of sexual violence as masculine affect arrest patterns. This builds on my undergraduate honors thesis, which examined how criminal legal system actors cast women of color accused of sex crimes as queer and masculine to get them to conform to sex offender stereotypes. 

My work on race, gender, and sex crime case processing has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation Law & Society Dissertation Grant, the UCI Law Initiative to End Family Violence, and the American Society of Criminology. Additionally, my work was a Finalist for American Society of Criminology Division on Queer Criminology Student Paper Award.

Criminal Legal System Data Biases

This line of research, conducted in conjunction with my colleague Christine Head in Informatics, examines how the accessibility, accuracy, and consistency of criminal legal system data affects biases in emerging predictive policing technologies. Using my experience attempting to gather incarceration data from U.S. state departments of corrections as a starting point, we analyze how cross-state differences in criminal legal system data complicate national-level data sets that scholars rely upon like the National Incident-Based Reporting System. We find that particularly when it comes to race and ethnicity, cross-state differences in how criminal legal system data is collected, stored, and disseminated obfuscate biases against Latinx people in the criminal legal system. Additionally, we examine how state-level bureaucrats make decisions about criminal legal system data dissemination, and how those decisions affect predictive policing AI models. 

Our research has been published in The Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (CHI ’25), and presented at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems in Japan, the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems Annual Meeting. 

Title IX Processes and Gender-Based Violence Survivors with Marginalized Identities

My work on Title IX is rooted in my experience as a survivor of sexual violence who spent five years doing campus anti-sexual violence advocacy work. In my project published in Feminist Criminology, I conducted a survey of students at U.S. college campuses who had experienced school Title IX processes. I found that survivors of sexual violence experienced secondary victimization similar to what survivors of sexual violence experience in the criminal legal system, and that this was exacerbated by survivors feeling like they must have been treated better than other survivors despite being treated poorly. For my publication in The International Journal of Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy, I analyzed 80 school sexual violence policies across Canada, the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. to analyze how these policies protected survivors with one or more marginalized identities. This analysis revealed that school policies generally failed to account for the ways that the intersection of race, sexuality, and other identity categories shape survivors’ experiences addressing sexual violence. 

My research on Title IX was presented at the 63rd annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and won the 2022 American Sociological Association Student Forum Paper Award.