Bio

Rutgers opened up a world of professional opportunities for me. I learned so much from the faculty who taught me, especially from my mentors Profs. Adler, Mueller and Clarke. Professor Gerhard Mueller taught to me took at every crime problem, not just in a local or national context, but also from a cross-cultural, international perspective. I endeavored to do this in my early work on drug trafficking and it is why, many years later, I became the founding director of the B.A. in International Criminal Justice at John Jay and why I published an associated text on this subject with Cambridge University Press. Professor Freda Adler opened my eyes to the special place of women in the criminal justice system, which is why I studied women policing for more than 20 years and why I am now focusing my research on violence committed against women, especially in developing countries. Professor Ron Clarke taught me that it was not enough merely to study crime, but it was even more important to devote effort to thinking about how to prevent it. He showed me how to identify what he calls the “opportunity structure” for each specific crime that one studies and how to think about manipulating its various “facilitating conditions” so as to prevent it. He also introduced me to the annual ECCA (Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis) symposiums, of which I have now attended 19, each time in a different country. This has not only enlarged my international perspective, but has also allowed me to make many good friends around the world.

No doubt, many other graduates of the School can tell similar stories of the help given them by their faculty mentors. I believe that the major benefit of attending graduate school is being able to interact with mentors who take a personal interest in you and your work. Without this experience, someone such as myself, a girl from rural India, could not become a professor at a respected academic institution in America.