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Northeastern University
Race & Justice Lab
CrimRxiv Consortium, Founding Member
Northeastern University’s Race & Justice Lab (RJL) is based at the Center on Crime, Race, & Justice (CRJ) in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. RJL utilizes strategic social science research methodologies to assist government agencies, educational institutions, and community stakeholders in the development of policy changes to advance racial justice. RJL focuses on identifying and understanding racial disparities in the administration of justice, evaluating efforts to remedy racial disparities and bias across stages of the justice system; and, illuminating the role of implicit and explicit racial bias in the criminal justice system. The Directors of RJL are Kevin Drakulich and Jack McDevitt.
Published: Jun 13, 2024
We explore how concerned Americans are about the risk of violence faced by Black Americans. Using a 2022 American National Election Studies (ANES) survey, we compare concern for Black Americans as the victims of crime versus the police. We find White Americans to be the least ...
Published: Oct 23, 2023
While major crimes capture the headlines, minor offenses (and even more minor norm violations that fall short of legal offenses) are much more common. And despite being minor, the experience of them can be uncomfortable, annoying, offensive, or even scary. This set of facts ...
Published: May 08, 2023
Most judicial, regulatory, and administrative systems, at least formally, are concerned with the fairness and transparency of their decisions concerning the public. Fairness and transparency of criminal justice operations are critical to creating trust in the legal system and ...
Published: Dec 17, 2022
How can public opinion research help achieve badly needed criminal justice reforms? Unfortunately, public opinion has frequently been used in ways that help construct barriers to reform. Understanding the reasons—such as sources of public opinion about crime and justice, the ...
Published: Dec 01, 2022
In the spring and summer of 2020, a remarkable number of Americans participated in a remarkable number of protests in support of Black Lives Matter. How did the general public understand these protests, and where does support for the movement stand overall? We answer this ...
Published: Sep 07, 2022
Objectives Police use of excessive—even fatal—force is a significant social issue, one at the symbolic heart of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement. However, a substantial number of Americans—disproportionately White—tend to minimize the prevalence of this issue. We ...
Published: Apr 19, 2022
It matters how people view the police—and that there is a substantial racial gap in these views. Research has primarily focused on police experiences to explain generally less-positive views among Black Americans. We recommend a subtle but vital shift in focus, seeking ...
Published: Mar 18, 2022
Guns are highly visible in the news, in politics, and in American culture more broadly. While most Americans support some gun control, a significant and vocal minority of Americans are firmly opposed. Drawing on work from the recently developing sociology of modern gun ...
Published: Aug 08, 2021
This study answers the research questions outlined below. Answering these questions will contribute to scholarship and inform policymaking around Latinx victimization in important ways, capitalizing on longitudinal data on victimization of Latinx adults and qualitative data ...
Published: Jun 26, 2021
While a long history of scholarship has explored fear as an affective reaction to the prospect of crime, a much smaller number of studies have suggested that anger may be both more common and more predictive of punitive policy views (e.g. Ditton et al. 1999a; Johnson 2009; ...
Published: May 27, 2021
White Americans, on average, do not support Black Lives Matter, while Black Americans generally express strong support. The lack of support among white Americans is striking, and we argue that it matters why this racial gap exists. Using a nationally-representative survey ...
Published: Mar 30, 2021
Despite debates about the “material militarization” of the police, relatively little information on mass public opinion about police weapons, equipment, and gear currently exists. We analyze data from a national, opt-in panel of survey participants to assess public opinion ...
Published: Oct 24, 2020
There is more or less a consensus agreement among pollsters and scholars that measures of public opinion are influenced by factors such as question wording or order, interviewer-respondent dynamics, or other features of the context in which the survey takes places ...
Published: Feb 18, 2020
A series of deaths of black Americans at the hands of the police sparked mass protests, received extensive media coverage, and fueled a new civil rights movement in the years leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Both major party nominees campaigned on issues of race ...
Published: Jan 25, 2020
Purpose: To test whether exposure to news images depicting law enforcement affects public attitudes toward the police. Method: Participants drawn from a national online panel were randomly assigned to view one of three pictures that depicted a range of hostile to friendly ...
Published: Feb 28, 2019
Hate crimes have received substantial scholarly attention, largely focusing on victims from marginal groups. Large numbers of White Americans also report being the victim of racial hate crime, though very little research has sought to examine the etiology or meaning of anti-...
