Criminology

Immigration policy and enforcement practices in the U.S. now extend beyond the border to the country’s interior, impacting the private lives of millions of undocumented and mixed-status families in new ways. Criminology, law & society Assistant Professor Carolina Validivia's new book, Sanctuary Making: Immigrant Families Reshaping Geographies of Deportability (UC Press, Feb. 2026), traces this shift. 

Valdivia shows how as enforcement has expanded and deepened, new “hot spots” have appeared across nontraditional sites such as neighborhoods, roads, worksites, hospitals, grocery stores, and homes. Undercurrents of fear, anxiety, and loss permeate the everyday lives of the families navigating these terrains of enforcement. The School of Social Ecology scholar reveals the emotional and material labor of young adults that often underpins families’ sanctuary making efforts—strategies to shield against the worst outcomes of enforcement.

This Program for Research on International Migration (PRIM) Speaker Series presentation is an in-person event where lunch will be served. Learn more about PRIM.

The UC Irvine Center for Psychology & Law presents this Winter 2026 event with Kyle C. Scherr, a Central Michigan University psychology professor, whose research uses basic social and cognitive psychological theories to understand applied outcomes. Much of this research focuses on issues at the intersection of psychology and law. 

One area examines the social cognitive underpinnings of suspect decision-making during police interrogations and the stigma associated with innocent individuals who falsely confess. Another area focuses on wrongful convictions and the social cognitive factors associated with decisions and judgments influencing the process leading to exoneration and the stigma and general experience of innocent individuals once released and exonerated. A third area focuses on social cognitive factors that can bias forensic evidence gathering and analysis.

This event features a happy hour from 5-6 p.m., followed by Dr. Scherr's lecture from 6-7 p.m.  

The UC Irvine Center for Psychology & Law presents this Winter 2026 event featuring Jason Schiffman, professor of psychology and the inaugural Director of Clinical Training for UC Irvine’s Clinical Psychology program, and Jasmine Tehrani, a forensic psychologist, USC assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and adjunct assistant professor of psychology as well as the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation Board of Parole Hearings Forensic Assessment Division's chief psychologist.

This event features a happy hour from 5-6 p.m., followed by the lectures from 6-7 p.m.  

The School of Social Ecology's Center in Law, Society, and Culture, UCI LIFTED (Leveraging Inspriing Futures Through Educational Degrees) and the School of Law's Criminal Justice and Community Violence Intervention Clinics sponsor a screening of "They Call Us Monsters," followed by a discussion with director Ben Lear and two people featured in the documentary, Juan Gamez and Antonio Hernandez.

The UC Irvine Law Center for Law, Equality and Race welcomes Susan Bibler Coutin, Jennifer M.

Frederik Rom Taxhjelm is a Ph.D. Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, and currently a Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley. His work examines self-isolation in Danish prisons and the limits and paradoxes of rights-based discourses of punishment. He has published in Punishment & Society and Incarceration, most recently as guest editor of a themed issue on “pockets of punitiveness” in the welfare state.

Drawing on interviews with self-isolated prisoners, Taxhjelm's talk explores how they make sense of their painful form of confinement. It identifies five types of narrative work on the self through which they attempt to adapt to isolation: the respectable self, the reparable self, the controlled self, the caring self, and the future self. To the isolated men, such narratives are pivotal to understanding the choice to self-isolate but also to making space in isolation for hope and reinvention, to the extent that that is possible. Rather than offering a defense of isolation, the talk provides an empirical account of how prisoners derive meaning from the harms of its emptiness. It concludes by discussing the precarious nature of self-understandings produced in solitude.

Draft paper available upon request. E-mail reiterk@uci.edu

 Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Africana Studies Graduate Chair and the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Perry came to Penn from Brown University, where she was Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Her research is focused on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. 

Perry's first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is currently at work on her second book, which is focused on the ways in which state violence limits activist research and writing.

What follows is Perry's abstract for the UC Irvine event:

Registration is now open for a program that will focus on a recent upgrade to the NRE website (https://exonerationregistry.org), which hosts the nation’s largest database of wrongful conviction cases. Learn how to use new features and capabilities now built into the site. 

This training, which is open to the public, was made possible by Grant No. 15PBJA-24-GK-02883-WRNG awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. 

Abstract:

Extensive research finds that place-based investment reduces crime,

leading practitioners to propose it as an alternative to police-centered

policies. We explore another channel linking local investment to

crime—that police patrol is endogenous to the built environment-using

smartphone location data. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation in

HUD rules designating Qualified Census Tracts (QCTs), we find police

increase patrol in QCTs enough to explain all the observed violent

crime reduction. Police increase patrol more in neighborhoods with

more Black residents and fewer recently-built units. Our findings

highlight the importance of understanding police response to local

development before framing it as a substitute for policing.

Bio: Emily Owens is the Chair of the Department of Criminology,

Law, and Society at UC Irvine. She also holds a secondary appointment

in the Department of Economics. Professor Owens studies a wide range

of topics in the economics of crime, including policing, sentencing, and

the impact of local public policies on criminal behavior. Her research

examines how government policies affect the prevalence of criminal

activity as well as how agents within the criminal justice system,

particularly police, prosecutors, and judges, respond to policy changes.

Distinguished Professor Elizabeth Loftus is a featured speaker at the Nobel Prize Summit on a panel titled “Making Sense of Misinformation.”

Her talk is titled, “The Misinformation Effect.”

More information is available online.