Bobby Boxerman
Bobby is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UMSL, with an anticipated graduation date of January 2025. He obtained a Bachelor of Science from Missouri University of Science and Technology and a Master of Arts from the University of Missouri – Saint Louis. His research interests include public safety policies, police training and wellbeing, and crime and geography. His dissertation examines role heterogeneity and orientation among police recruits. Bobby is also involved in applied criminal justice research; he has worked at the Regional Justice Information Service since 2021 as a part-time research analyst, where he has studied geographic crime distribution to better equip local law enforcement responses, as well as contributed to the Bureau of Justice Statistics annual Firearm Inquiry Statistics Program (FIST). He has also worked for the Council on Criminal Justice as a crime analysis consultant since 2022, where he has co-authored a series of reports on national crime trends. His work with the Council has been used by the White House, and featured on local and national outlets such as the Washington Post, New York Times, and St. Louis Post Dispatch.
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Victoria Inzana
Victoria is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UMSL, with an anticipated graduation date of May 2025. She obtained a Bachelor of Science from Florida State University and a Master of Arts from the University of Missouri- Saint Louis. She is broadly interested in corrections, reentry, and punishment work. Her dissertation examines identity shifts within the correctional context. Victoria's dissertation, which has been supported by an NSF Law and Science Dissertation grant, as well as the Charles G. Huber, Jr. Endowed Dissertation Fellowship and the Association of Doctoral Programs in Criminology and Criminal Justice, looks at how the tensions between rehabilitative and punitive goals influence social roles and identities in prison. She does this through ethnographic observations of people who are currently incarcerated in a men's prison and engaged in a prison theater program. In essence, Victoria is looking at Goffman's front and back stages through a literal theater production and how this might influence identity construction in carceral spaces. She finds that the kinds of social roles people have access to shape their identities, and argues that this is important for how we understand desistance. This could change how we view in-prison programming and prison culture. Her work has appeared in journals such as Justice Quarterly and The Journal for Contemporary Criminal Justice.
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Lauren Morgan
Lauren recently completed her PhD in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at UMSL. Her research interests include the intersection of juvenile justice and foster care systems, child welfare and juvenile justice policy, organizations and criminal justice, and crossover youth. Her dissertation research examines the organizational properties of the juvenile justice and foster care systems in the Midwest and their impacts on dual system youth. Lauren is also involved in projects that explore the mechanisms underlying criminal justice reform and the effects of criminal justice policies on crime. Over the past two years, Lauren has been a part of the Research Assistantship Program at the National Institute of Justice working on projects related to corrections, reentry, and police officer training techniques.
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Benjamin Hamilton
Email: bchb83@umsystem.edu
Ben joined UMSL's Criminology and Criminal Justice PhD program in 2015 after entering the MA program a year prior. He earned his BA in Criminal Justice at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and his research interests include offender decision making, measurement of theoretical constructs, evaluation of criminal justice interventions, and quantitative methods.
Dissertation Title: “Net Benefits and Offender Decision Making: Investigating some Overlooked Predictions of a Rational Choice Theory of Crime.”
Dissertation Committee: Kyle Thomas (Chair), Lee Ann Slocum, Janet Lauritsen, and Thomas Loughran.
Areas of Interest: Offender decision making, measurement, evaluation research, partial identification, and quantitative methods.
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