Areas of Expertise

• Crime trends
• Immigration and crime
• Media, culture and crime
• Criminal justice reform

Key Findings

• Rap music lyrics are being used as evidence of defendants’ guilt in criminal proceedings throughout the United States with increased frequency. MORE
• The race of the lyrics’ author was not found to have a significant impact on overall perceptions of the song. MORE
• The current body of immigration-crime research identifies a largely nonsignificant relationship between immigration and crime. MORE

Biography

Charis Kubrin, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, is an expert in immigration and crime, violence and crime trends, criminal justice reform, race and ethnicity, and rap music and media, culture and crime.

Kubrin is the Co-Director of the Irvine Laboratory for the Study of Space and Crime and co-organizer of an NSF-funded workshop, Realigning California Corrections: Legacies of the Past, the Great Experiment and Trajectories for the Future. She served as an Associate Professor of Sociology at George Washington University and was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Criminology at Oxford University. Kubrin has received awards from the American Society of Criminology, the Western Society of Criminology, the District of Columbia Sociological Society and the University of California, Irvine.

She has been published in academic journals and is the co-author of books including, “Introduction to Criminal Justice: A Sociological Perspective,” “Punishing Immigrants: Policy, Politics and Injustice” and “Researching Theories of Crime and Deviance.”

Kubrin received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from the University of Washington and B.A. in Sociology from Smith College.

Follow Charis on Twitter: @cekubrin