Christopher Thomas

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

As a racialized labor market institution, the criminal justice system shapes racial patterns in local labor markets through processes of exclusion and marginalization. How do local county jails contribute to these dynamics? To examine that question, the relationship between county-level jail and employment rates is examined across the U.S. between...

Final published manuscript available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2022.102008

Objectives To test whether news images from George Floyd protests and the Capitol insurrection affected feelings about the police differentially depending on respondents’ primary news environment. Methods This mixed-methods explanatory study combines national digital survey experiments and structural topic modeling of open-ended questions. Survey...

This study examines direct observations of outdoor routine activities to investigate the pathways through which temperatures shape crime. Daily administrative records of crime, weather and outdoor activity were assembled from 2015 to 2019 in New York City. Mediation analysis (with bootstrapped standard errors) reveals that alterations in routine ac...

Presidentially-appointed federal district court judges exercise broad discretion in determining criminal sentences, directly affecting individuals and communities in the United States. Against a backdrop of longstanding ethnoracial inequities in our courts, the judiciary's practice of redacting judge names from public data obstructs analysis of ind...

Purpose: Current evidence suggests volatile temperatures are becoming more common because of climate change and can be expected to become even more frequent in the future. By focusing on recent temperature variability, we attempt to estimate one important dimension of climate change's impact on violent crime by exploring associations between sudden...

Pretrial detention functions differently depending on why an individual is referred to the legal system. For those charged with misdemeanor offenses, the pretrial process is often the primary punishment, irrespective of guilt or innocence. For those charged with felonies, the primary punishment often comes from the resulting adjudicative sentence....

Purpose The current study expands our knowledge regarding the effects of pre-adjudicatory detention by examining the moderating role of a juvenile's race/ethnicity on the association between pre-adjudicatory detention and juvenile court outcomes (e.g., dismissal, adjudication, or disposition outcome decisions). Methods The current study draws on d...

Individuals make sense of experience through telling stories they hope others will hear. To establish an interpretive connection with their audience, narrators must tell stories that are tellable, conceptualized as engaging but not too socially or emotionally challenging. We analyze the narratives of death-sentenced exoneree activists. When depicti...

Pimps quit their illicit work in sex markets for many reasons, such as job dissatisfaction, having a child, going to prison, and feeling guilty. In this study, we used a mixed methods approach to explore pimps’ interdiscursive reasons for quitting. Our analytic sample focuses on 43 self-identified former pimps, who were interviewed in situ in housi...

Since the late 1990s public opinion about cannabis legalization has become drastically more liberal, and some states have begun to legalize cannabis for recreational use. Why have attitudes changed so much? Prior research has considered a few of the reasons for this change, but this is the first comprehensive and empirically-based study to consider...

In this mixed methods study of 56 entry-level pimps in Harlem, NY, we explore how pimps’ choices to use violence or control differ by where they are selling sex, who their clientele are, and whether these violent and controlling behaviors yield higher returns. First, we qualitatively explore how pimps account for each of these choices, and how each...