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Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics (2009)

Chapter: Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2009. Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12671.
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Page 347
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2009. Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12671.
×
Page 348
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2009. Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12671.
×
Page 349
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2009. Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12671.
×
Page 350
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2009. Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12671.
×
Page 351
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2009. Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12671.
×
Page 352

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–C– Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff Robert M. Groves (Chair) is director of the U.S. Census Bureau, having been confirmed to that position on July 13, 2009. During this panel’s work, he was professor of sociology and director of the Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Survey Errors and Survey Costs and the coauthor of Nonresponse in Household Surveys. A National Associate of the National Academies, he has served on seven National Research Council committees and is a former member of the Committee on National Statistics. From 1990 to 1992, he served as associate director for statistical design, standards, and methodol- ogy at the U.S. Census Bureau. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and he has received the Innovator Award and an award for exceptionally distinguished achievement from the American Association for Public Opin- ion Research. He has an M.A. in statistics, an M.A. in sociology, and a Ph.D. in sociology, all from the University of Michigan. William G. Barron, Jr., is a consultant to Princeton University and has served as consultant to the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau. After a 30-year career at the Bureau of Labor Statistics—serving as deputy commissioner (1983–1988) and acting commissioner (once for a 23-month period)—he moved to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1998. There he served as deputy director and chief operating officer. Heavily involved in the conduct and completion of the 2000 census and the development 347

348 JUSTICE STATISTICS of plans for the 2010 census, he served as acting director of the Census Bureau in 2001 and early 2002. Prior to his consultancy at Princeton, he was visiting lecturer and Frederick H. Shultz Class of 1951 professor of in- ternational economic policy, and later the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs and Company visiting professor and lecturer at the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has served as senior vice president for economic studies at the National Opinion Research Cen- ter at the University of Chicago and as senior client executive at Northrop Grumman Corporation. He has a B.A. from the University of Maryland. William Clements is dean of the School of Graduate Studies and professor of criminal justice at Norwich University. Prior to assuming the role of dean, he was director and creator of the Master of Justice Administration program (2002–2005) and executive director of the Vermont Center for Jus- tice Research (1994–2005), Vermont’s Bureau of Justice Statistics–affiliated Statistical Analysis Center. He has been involved in bringing Norwich’s curriculum to the online environment and developing the online graduate program model. His professional research interests and experience include a variety of criminal justice system studies in program evaluation, data systems development, and adjudication patterns. He has worked on and published in the areas of incident-based crime data, juvenile justice, the operation of the courts, and sentencing trends. He has served in various capacities and as president of the Northeast Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and he is a past president and executive committee member of the Justice Research and Statistics Association. He is coeditor of Justice Research and Policy. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Delaware. Daniel L. Cork (Study Director) is a senior program officer for the Com- mittee on National Statistics (CNSTAT), currently serving as study director of the Panel to Review the Programs of the Bureau of Justice Statistics and co-study director of the Panel on the Design of the 2010 Census Program of Evaluations and Experiments. He previously served as study director of the Panel on Residence Rules in the Decennial Census and program officer for the Committee to Review the Feasibility, Accuracy, and Technical Capability of a National Ballistics Database, as well as work with other CNSTAT census panels. His research interests include quantitative criminology, particularly space-time dynamics in homicide; Bayesian statistics; and statistics in sports. He has a B.S. in statistics from George Washington University and an M.S. in statistics and a joint Ph.D. in statistics and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University.

APPENDIX C 349 Janet L. Lauritsen is professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri–St Louis. Much of her research is focused on understanding individual, family, and neighborhood sources of violent vic- timization as well as racial and ethnic differences in violence. She served as chairperson of the American Statistical Association Committee on Law and Justice Statistics from 2004 to 2006 and as visiting research fellow at the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2002 to 2006. During her fellowship, she assembled two expert meetings on major options for the National Crime Victimization Survey, several of the participants of which are also members of this panel. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Criminology and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology and on the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Colin Loftin is co-director of the Violence Research Group, a research col- laboration with colleagues at the University at Albany and the University of Maryland that conducts research on the causes and consequences of inter- personal violence. The major themes of the research are (1) understanding violence as a social process extending beyond individual action, (2) improv- ing the quality of data on the incidence and nature of crime, (3) design and evaluation of violence prevention policies, and (4) investigation of popu- lation risk factors for violence. The Violence Research Group published the Statistical Handbook on Violence in America. A past member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice, he previously served on the Panel on Understanding and Preventing Violence. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina. James P. Lynch is distinguished professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. At the Bureau of Social Science Research in the 1980s, he served as manager of the National Crime Survey redesign effort for the bureau. He became a faculty member in the Department of Justice, Law, and Society at American University in 1986, where he remained as associate professor, full professor, and chair of the department until leaving for John Jay in 2005. He has published 3 books, 25 refereed articles, and over 40 book chapters and other publications. He was elected to the executive board of the American Society of Criminology in 2002 and has served on the ed- itorial boards of Criminology and the Journal of Quantitative Criminology and as deputy editor of Justice Quarterly. He has also chaired the American Statistical Association’s Committee on Law and Justice Statistics. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. Ruth D. Peterson is professor of sociology and director of the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University, where she has been on

350 JUSTICE STATISTICS the faculty since 1985. She is also a fellow of the National Consortium of Violence Research, where she coordinates the Race and Ethnicity Research Working Group. She has conducted research on legal decision making and sentencing, crime and deterrence, and most recently, patterns of urban crime. She is widely published in the areas of capital punishment, race, gender, and socioeconomic disadvantage. Her current research focuses on the linkages among racial residential segregation, concentrated social disadvantage and race-specific crime, and the social context of prosecutorial and court decisions. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin. Carol V. Petrie (Senior Program Officer) is director of the Committee on Law and Justice at the National Academies. She also served as the director of planning and management at the National Institute of Justice, U.S. De- partment of Justice, responsible for policy and administration. In 1994, she served as the acting director of the National Institute of Justice. She has conducted research on violence and public policy, and managed numerous research projects on the development of criminal behavior, domestic vio- lence, child abuse and neglect, and improving the operations of the criminal justice system. She has a B.S. in education from Kent State University. Trivellore E. Raghunathan is professor of biostatistics and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He also teaches in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. He is the director of the Biostatistics Collaborative and Method- ology Research Core, a research unit designed to foster collaborative and methodological research with the researchers in other departments in the School of Public Health and other allied schools. He is an associate director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health and a faculty member of the Center of Social Epidemiology and Population Health; he is also affiliated with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Before joining the University of Michigan in 1994, he was on the faculty in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Washington. His research interests are in the analysis of incomplete data, multiple impu- tation, Bayesian methods, design and analysis of sample surveys, small-area estimation, confidentiality and disclosure limitation, longitudinal data anal- ysis, and statistical methods for epidemiology. He has a Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University. Steven R. Schlesinger is chief of the Statistics Division at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO). He was director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 1983 to 1988 and was deputy director of the U.S. Depart- ment of Justice Office of Policy and Communications from 1991 to 1993.

APPENDIX C 351 He has also taught on the political science faculties of Rutgers University and the Catholic University of America. He is the author of 2 books and over 25 articles on legal topics. Among his professional awards are the O.J. Hawkins Award for Innovative Leadership and Outstanding Contributions to Crim- inal Justice Systems, Policy and Statistics in the United States, the U.S. Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Management, and AO’s Meri- torious Service Award. He has a Ph.D from the Claremont Graduate School. Wesley G. Skogan has been a faculty member at Northwestern University since 1971 and holds joint appointments with the political science depart- ment and the University’s Institute for Policy Research. His research focuses on the interface between the public and the legal system, crime preven- tion, victim services, and community-oriented policing. He has written four books on policing; all are empirical studies of community policing initiatives in Chicago and elsewhere. His 1990 book Disorder and Decline examined public involvement in these programs, their efficacy, and the issues involved in police-citizen cooperation in order maintenance. Another line of his research concerns neighborhood and community responses to crime. He has edited a series of technical monographs on victimization research and authored a technical review of the National Crime Victimization Survey that was published in Public Opinion Quarterly. He served as a consultant to the United Kingdom Home Office, developing and analyzing the British Crime Survey. He has been a visiting scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut (Freiburg), the Dutch Ministry of Justice, the University of Alberta, and Johns Hopkins University. He spent 2 years as a visiting fellow at the National Institute of Justice. At the National Research Council, he has served on the Committee on Law and Justice and chaired the Committee on Research on Police Poli- cies and Practices. He has a B.A. in government from Indiana University, an M.A. in political science from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University. Bruce D. Spencer is professor of statistics and faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. His interests include the interactions between statistics and policy, demographic statistics, and sam- pling. He chaired the statistics department at Northwestern from 1988 to 1999 and 2000 to 2001. He directed the Methodology Research Center of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago from 1985 to 1992. From 1992 to 1994 he was a senior research statisti- cian at NORC. At the National Research Council he served as a member of the CNSTAT Panel on Formula Allocations, as well as the Mathematical Sci- ences Assessment Panel and the Panel on Statistical Issues in AIDS Research; as a staff member he served as study director for the Panel on Small Area Estimates of Population and Income. He has a Ph.D. from Yale University.

352 JUSTICE STATISTICS Bruce Western is professor of sociology at Harvard University and direc- tor of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Previously, he was professor of sociology at Princeton University and faculty associate in the Office of Population Re- search. His research interests broadly include political and comparative so- ciology, stratification and inequality, and methodology. More specifically, he has studied how institutions shape labor market outcomes. Work in this area has developed along two tracks: the growth and decline of labor unions and their economic effects in the United States and Europe; and the impact of the American penal system on labor market inequality. His methodological work has focused on the application of Bayesian statistics to research prob- lems in sociology. He is the author of Punishment and Inequality in America and, with Mary Patillo and David Weiman, of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration, both publications of the Russell Sage Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) of the U.S. Department of Justice is one of the smallest of the U.S. principal statistical agencies but shoulders one of the most expansive and detailed legal mandates among those agencies. Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice Statistics examines the full range of BJS programs and suggests priorities for data collection.

BJS's data collection portfolio is a solid body of work, well justified by public information needs or legal requirements and a commendable effort to meet its broad mandate given less-than-commensurate fiscal resources. The book identifies some major gaps in the substantive coverage of BJS data, but notes that filling those gaps would require increased and sustained support in terms of staff and fiscal resources.

In suggesting strategic goals for BJS, the book argues that the bureau's foremost goal should be to establish and maintain a strong position of independence. To avoid structural or political interference in BJS work, the report suggests changing the administrative placement of BJS within the Justice Department and making the BJS directorship a fixed-term appointment.

In its thirtieth year, BJS can look back on a solid body of accomplishment; this book suggests further directions for improvement to give the nation the justice statistics--and the BJS--that it deserves.

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