About My Work
I am a political scientist and public opinion researcher studying how people encounter law, punishment, surveillance, and political power in everyday life. My work focuses on criminal justice contact, incarceration, reentry, privacy, and public opinion, with particular attention to how institutional experiences shape political identity, group consciousness, and attitudes toward the state.
I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University, where my dissertation developed the concepts of carceral identity and carceral group consciousness. More broadly, I use survey research, experiments, computational text analysis, and mixed-methods approaches to study how people understand legal institutions and their place within them.
Alongside my academic research, I bring applied experience in public opinion research through my work at YouGov, where I design, manage, and analyze survey research on politics, policy, and public attitudes. Across both academic and applied settings, I am interested in research that is theoretically grounded, methodologically careful, and useful beyond the academy.
My research is also informed by lived experience with the criminal justice system. That experience gives me a perspective that remains uncommon in academic and applied research on punishment, and it shapes my commitment to careful measurement, humane interpretation, and research that takes justice-impacted people seriously as citizens, thinkers, and political actors.
Lived Experience
In June 2007, I was indicted in the Northern District of Iowa for a marijuana conspiracy. I accepted a plea agreement a few months later and was convicted of conspiracy to distribute marijuana and conspiracy to commit money laundering resulting in a 108 month sentence in federal prison, and an 8 year term of supervised release after my incarceration.
I was ultimately sent to USF Hazelton in May 2008, and then transferred to FCI Waseca in November of that same year. For the majority of my time at Waseca, I was the production clerk at Waseca Cut and Sew, the institution's UNICOR. I was eligible for RDAP, and completed the program earning a 12 month sentence reduction. Between the twelve month reduction and earned good time, I was released from Waseca on December 18, 2013 after 76 months of incarceration.
Upon returning home and securing employment, I decided I also wanted to finish my education and enrolled in an online degree program through the University of Iowa in the fall of 2015. After completing my BA there in 2017 and continuing on to complete my Master's at Iowa State University in 2019, it was not until I had been accepted to the PhD program at Rutgers University that the US Probation Office finally requested to terminate my supervised release early. I was discharged from supervised release - and was finally free - on April 10, 2019 after nearly 12 years in the federal system. On December 10th, 2024, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation titled: "Carceral Identity and its Influence on Political Attitudes and Behavior."