Lindsay Leban

• Ph.D., Criminology
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Alabama at Birmingham

Drug markets are typically portrayed as male dominated, with men occupying the higher positions and women fulfilling the lower positions. Yet, the results of recent work highlight how women's participation and experiences in drug economies varies by the structure and organization of the specific market. We focus on the shake-and-bake ("shake") meth...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), a construct measuring childhood adversity via abuse and household dysfunction, is linked to subsequent health problems and maladaptive behaviors. Theorized as a cumulative stressor, ACEs promote a chain of negative outcomes across the life-course. Though ample medical and health research has provided support fo...

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are linked to problematic outcomes, but it remains unclear how ACEs affect developmental patterns of harmful behavior, and whether this varies by gender. This study examined these relationships among 868 youth participating in the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect. Group-based trajectory models ide...

Despite its widespread use, school suspension is related to negative outcomes in adolescence, including delinquency and low academic attainment. However, it remains less clear how other sources of adversity affect the relationship between suspension and negative outcomes. Drawing on longitudinal data on a sample of at-risk youth, this study examine...

General strain theory (GST) argues that experiencing strain is related to criminal behavior through experiencing negative emotional states. Although differences in these negative emotional states have been highlighted as a key way to understand gender differences in crime, it still remains unclear how these negative emotions may operate differently...

While rates of childhood obesity continue to rise in the United States, multiple studies have linked childhood obesity to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). ACEs researchers have begun to develop frameworks that identify protective factors that build resilience against ACEs. However, these frameworks have a limited evidence base. Utilizing data...

Purpose: The current study addresses criticisms of the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) model, specifically its limited focus on adversities outside the home and gender-based differences. We compare a diverse set of expanded ACEs to seminal household-focused ACEs individually, cumulatively, and in their relationship with delinquency by gender....

Malaysia has retained the death penalty for violent crimes and some nonviolent drug offenses. Major news dailies, controlled by political parties in the ruling coalition, have helped justify this stance in the past. This situation changed over 22 months when a new coalition, which campaigned on abolishing capital punishment, took office and sparked...

Research has suggested that involvement in offending can contribute to subsequent mental health problems, although the processes through which offending influences adverse mental health remain unclear. Recognizing the need to evaluate intervening factors in this relationship, we focus on the potential mediating role of parenting in the link between...

Despite the wealth of research investigating the adverse consequences of bullying, few studies have tested how bullying victimization is related to risky sexual behavior, such as unprotected sex among adolescents. To fill this gap, the current study examined the association between bullying victimization and the non-use of condoms, considering the...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been linked to a host of negative health and behavioral outcomes, including crime, delinquency, and violence. Recent work on ACEs suggests that the impact of ACEs differs by gender, but research is unclear on the mechanisms of this relationship and how they impact violent delinquency. To explore whether and...

Many researchers have noted that media coverage of drugs can be sensationalized and/or have questionable accuracy. Additionally, it has been alleged that the media often treats all drugs as harmful and can fail to differentiate between different types of drugs. Within this context, the researchers sought to deconstruct how media coverage was simila...

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are traumatic childhood events that can undermine youth development, and are linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and risk-taking behaviors in adulthood. ACEs are preventable, yet effective response strategies require comprehensive conceptualization and measurement of adversity. Although typically...

Despite considerable empirical attention to the nature of bullying, the overlap between bullying perpetration and victimization remains relatively overlooked. Moreover, even less is known about how these relationships vary across sex from a developmental perspective. This study examines sex differences in the overlap between bullying victimization...

Anti-methamphetamine advertisements typically adopt a shock, fear, and repulse approach with the hopes of scaring people away from using drugs. This approach is typified by Faces of Meth and the Meth Project campaigns. Unfortunately, such approaches tend to do little in the way of diverting people away from using methamphetamine (meth) and may inst...

Returning to society after incarceration is a challenging and stressful process, and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this difficult transition. Although previous research has identified social connectedness as reducing stress and improving wellbeing during stressful life events, much of this research has not addressed prison reentry, despite the...

Hacking, particularly among youth, is a relatively new form of deviance and its etiology is not well understood. Moreover, there is a lack of developmental approaches to understanding youth hacking, and the majority of studies on predictors of hacking have been cross-sectional. In light of this, we draw on prospective longitudinal data on a sample...

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have been linked to a host of negative outcomes in adolescence. However, research on the impact of ACEs on adolescent mental health has produced mixed results, leaving it unclear how ACEs may relate to depression and anxiety during adolescence. Moreover, this body of work has neglected how gender, risk and prote...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been linked to a host of subsequent negative health and behavioral problems. However, the role of sex in the ramifications of early ACEs remains unclear, particularly for delinquency and substance use initiation in adolescence. A small body of research has produced mixed findings on sex differences in the r...

This article undertakes a global review of women's involvement in cultivation , processing, transporting and selling drugs. It is underpinned by twin theoretical concerns. First, we recap and critique the emancipation thesis, especially from a global perspective. Secondly, we examine how diverse global contexts shape women's involvement and the rol...

This study investigated citizen attitudes about the public release of police body-worn camera (BWC) video. We examined quantitative and qualitative survey data from a convenience sample of 535 citizens living in and around Birmingham, Alabama, USA. We found citizens’ attitudes ranged widely and were often contextualized based on the circumstances o...

We explore how women’s narratives of abuse change, including narratives of self as well as narratives of their abusers. We draw on experiences from a photoethnography of people living in rural Alabama who use methamphetamine. The use of photographs taken throughout the project aid in both the representation of the women as well as in data collectio...

People consider potential risks and rewards while deciding whether to engage in crime. Such perceptions and their impact on behavior can vary according to individual differences like criminal self-efficacy, or one’s perception of criminal competency. We examine perceptions of skill, risk, and reward using semi-structured interviews with 46 women “s...

Using national survey and interview data from women patrol officers in the United States, we assess whether women are underrepresented in the upper ranks of policing because they are self-selecting out of promotions. With only 42% of the survey sample reporting a desire to promote, we indeed find evidence that many policewomen are either delaying o...

Background: Drug policies aimed at youth often adopt “scare tactics” approaches, which highlight harms of substances to dissuade youth from using them. However, the success of deterrent approaches remains widely debated, and some scholars have cautioned that these approaches may do more harm than good. Methods: Drawing on a sample of adolescents fr...

Despite the large body of literature investigating drug use, limited research has explored both the individual and structural dimensions of drug use, and an even smaller number of studies have focused on drug use in the Asian context. The current study draws on self-reported survey data on marijuana, methamphetamine, and opium use among offenders i...

Scholars have critiqued the field of criminology as focusing too heavily on positioning theories against one another in competition to reveal a “general theory of crime.” Such an approach assumes that the same factors influence all forms deviance, which is a problematic assumption, given that different forms of deviance can be influenced by differe...

Research on general strain theory has demonstrated the impact of strain on decisions to engage in crime and delinquency. However, people differ in their responses to strain and only some resort to crime or delinquency. There remain gaps in our knowledge of when, and under what conditions, individuals will react to strain with offending behavior. We...

Drug users often define themselves as functional users and depict others as dysfunctional (i.e. junkies). Previous research on the social identities of drug users has focused on the symbolic boundaries they create to distance themselves from stigmatized others. Investigators have yet to focus on how users account for their own boundary violations....

Religious adherents from most major faith traditions struggle in balancing their individual agency with divine leadership. While this issue of individual versus divine control is complex for those in free society, it becomes even more so when applied to those in correctional and treatment settings. For those attempting to recover from drug addictio...

From current arrest data, as well as scholarly research, it appears that methamphetamine (meth) is generally considered a “white drug.” Although most meth users are white, a nontrivial percentage is black. In this study we explore racial differences in the drug careers of women meth users. Specifically, we use in-depth interviews with 13 black and...