Bio

Andres F. Rengifo, Ph.D is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University – Newark. His research explores how crime and crime control are shaped by social factors and institutions, and how the “practice” of justice, social control, and punishment amplify some forms of inequality and create new systems of stratification. His collaborative work on race, neighborhood crime, and corrections/policing reform has appeared in leading journals such as Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Evaluation Review, among others. Andres has also helped leverage policy change domestically and abroad as affiliated researcher on topics such police stops, prisoner reentry, and drug treatment at the Vera Institute of Justice and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His current research focuses on the operation of first-appearance/arraignment courts in ten jurisdictions in the United States and Latin America (Colombia, Mexico and Argentina). More specifically, he draws on the direct observation of 1,600+ cases to document how justifications of punishment and rehabilitation by courtroom actors vary across cases and contexts, and how these discourses and debates relate to key dimensions of procedural justice and decisions about charging and bail/pre-trial detention.