Faculty

Edward J. Latessa received his PhD from Ohio State University and is  Professor Emeritus and Director of UCCI of the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.  Dr. Latessa has published over 170 works in the area of criminal justice, corrections, and juvenile justice.  He is co-author of eight books including What Works (and Doesn’t) in Reducing Recidivism, Corrections in the Community, and Corrections in America.  Professor Latessa has directed over 195 funded research projects including studies of day reporting centers, juvenile justice programs, drug courts, prison programs, intensive supervision programs, halfway houses, and drug programs. He and his staff have also assessed over 1,000 correctional programs throughout the United States, and he has provided assistance and workshops in forty-eight states.  Dr. Latessa served as President of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (1989-90).  He has also received several awards including;  Life Time Achievement Award from Rites of Passage (2018), William T. Rossiter Award from the Forensic Mental Health Association of California (2017), Marguerite Q. Warren and Ted B. Palmer Differential Intervention Award presented by the Division of Corrections and Sentencing of the American Society of Criminology (2010), Outstanding Community Partner Award from the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections (2010), Maud Booth Correctional Services Award in recognition of dedicated service and leadership presented by the Volunteers of America (2010), Community Hero Award presented by Community Resources for Justice, (2010), the Bruce Smith Award for outstanding contributions to criminal justice by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (2010), the George Beto Scholar, College of Criminal Justice, Sam Houston State University, (2009), the Mark Hatfield Award for Contributions in public policy research by The Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University (2008), the Outstanding Achievement Award by the National Juvenile Justice Court Services Association (2007), the August Vollmer Award from the American Society of Criminology (2004), the Simon Dinitz Criminal Justice Research Award from the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (2002), the Margaret Mead Award for dedicated service to the causes of social justice and humanitarian advancement by the International Community Corrections Association (2001), the Peter P. Lejins Award for Research from the American Correctional Association (1999); ACJS Fellow Award (1998); ACJS Founders Award (1992); and the Simon Dinitz award by the Ohio Community Corrections Organization.  In 2013 he was identified as one of the most innovative people in criminal justice by a national survey conducted by the Center for Court Innovation in partnership with the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Professor Campbell earned a Ph.D. in Community Psychology at Michigan State University and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry, Division of Prevention and Community Research at Yale University. Her primary research interests include delinquency prevention, risk assessment, juvenile justice policy, and neighborhood ecology. She has also conducted research on racial and health disparities experienced by individuals who come in contact with the criminal justice and child welfare system, child welfare policy, juvenile sex offender assessments, and prisoner reentry.  Her work has been published in various journals which include Criminal Justice and Behavior, Child and Youth Services Review, Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, Journal of Traumatic Stress, and Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice. She has received funding support for her research from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Science Foundation. She is a member of the American Psychological Association, Society for Community Research and Action, American Society of Criminology, and the Racial Democracy, Crime & Justice Network. She teaches in the area of juvenile justice and corrections.

Christopher J. Sullivan is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.  He received his doctoral degree from Rutgers University in 2005.  His main research interests include developmental and life-course criminology; juvenile delinquency and prevention policy; and research methodology and analytic methods.  He has published roughly 80 academic articles and book chapters on various justice and criminology-related topics.  Since 2000, he has worked as a Data Analyst or Principal Investigator on several federally or state-funded studies of juvenile justice and delinquency issues.  His recent research has been funded by the State of Ohio, National Institute of Justice, and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. He teaches in the areas of criminology and research methods.  He is currently Co-Editor of the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.

Dr. Ebony Ruhland received her Ph.D. from the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on how criminal justice policies and practices impact individuals, families, and communities. Dr. Ruhland is currently working on research projects in four areas: 1) examining factors that lead to probation revocations, including the use probation conditions, specifically supervision fees; 2) exploring factors parole members consider to determine readiness for release; 3) identifying ways to bridge police and community relationships; and 4) examining the impacts of parental incarceration on children.
 
Through her research, Dr. Ruhland hopes to find ways to improve criminal justice and corrections policies to reduce mass incarceration, racial disparities, and collateral consequences while at the same time maintaining public safety.
 
Prior to joining the faculty, Dr. Ruhland was the research director at the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota Law School. Her work has been published in Criminology, Family Court Review, and Children and Youth Services Review.

Professor Cullen received his Ph.D. in sociology and education from Columbia University in 1979.  He is a past President and Fellow of both the American Society of Criminology and of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.  He was the recipient of the 2010 ASC Edwin H. Sutherland Award. From 2010 to 2014, he served on the Office of Justice Programs Science Advisory Board for the U.S. Department of Justice.  He has published more than 300 works in the areas of criminological theory, correctional policy, white-collar crime, public opinion about crime and justice, victimology, and the organization of knowledge.  His most notable books include Reaffirming Rehabilitation, Rethinking Crime and Deviance Theory, Corporate Crime Under Attack: The Ford Pinto Case and Beyond, and Unsafe in the Ivory Tower: The Sexual Victimization of College Women.  He has authored widely used texts, such as Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences, Criminological Theory: Past to Present—Essential Readings, and Correctional Theory: Context and Consequences.  His most recent works include Communities and Crime: An Enduring American Challenge and Environmental Corrections: A New Paradigm for Supervising Offenders in the Community.  In the graduate program, he continues to teach Structural Theories of Crime and Criminal Justice Research Practicum.

John Wooldredge holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois and is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice. His research and publications focus on institutional corrections (crowding, inmate and officer well-being, and inmate crimes and victimizations) and criminal case processing (sentencing and recidivism, and micro- versus macro-level extralegal disparities in case processing and outcomes). He is currently involved in an NIJ funded study of the use and impacts of restrictive housing in Ohio prisons (with Josh Cochran), and in projects focusing on PTSD among correctional officers, prison program effects on offenders' subsequent behaviors during and after incarceration, and extralegal disparities in prison sanctions imposed for rule violations. Recent books include The Oxford Handbook of Prisons and Imprisonment (co-edited with Paula Smith; published by Oxford University Press in 2018), and Understanding Prison Violence (co-authored with Ben Steiner; published by Taylor and Francis in 2020). Recent journal articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Annual Review of Criminology, Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Criminology, Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and Justice Quarterly. In the undergraduate program, he teaches courses on institutional corrections and research methods.  His courses in the graduate program include a seminar on institutional corrections, and classes on multi-level modeling, sampling, and structural equation modeling.

Joshua C. Cochran received his Ph.D. from Florida State University in 2013. His research focuses on crime, incarceration, and inequality. He is co-author of the book Prisoner Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration (2013, Sage) and also The Fundamentals of Criminological and Criminal Justice Inquiry: The Science and Art of Conducting, Evaluating, and Using Research (2019, Cambridge). His writing appears in leading criminology and crime policy journals and his research has received multiple awards including the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Corrections and Sentencing Dissertation Award and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ Outstanding Student Paper Award for work from his Ph.D. thesis focused on incarceration and the implications for inmate social ties. He recently received the Distinguished New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Corrections and Sentencing and the New Scholar Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Patricia Van Voorhis, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.  She received her doctorate degree in Criminal Justice from the State University of New York at Albany. Dr. Van Voorhis has published extensively in the leading criminology and criminal justice journals and is the author of Psychological Classification of the Adult, Male Prison Inmate and lead author of Correctional Counseling and Rehabilitation, currently in its 8th edition. She has provided and continues to provide expertise to federal, state and local agencies on topics pertaining to correctional effectiveness, program implementation, evaluation techniques, women offenders, risk assessment and correctional classification. She is the former deputy editor of Justice Quarterly, the co-founder of the Division of Corrections and Sentencing of the American Society of Criminology, and has served on many professional and civic boards of directors, including for the American Society of Criminology and the International Community Corrections Association.  Dr. Van Voorhis is a fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology and has received several awards for scholarly attainment, including the American Society of Criminology’s August Vollmer Award, the Simon Dinitz Research Award from the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, the Coramae Richey Mann Leadership Award from the Minority and Women Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the Marguerite Q. Warren and Ted Palmer Differential and Individualized Intervention Award, the Volunteers of America’s Maud Booth Award for Correctional Service, the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Division of Corrections and Sentencing of the American Society of Criminology and the Distinguished Alumni Award for Scholarship from the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany.  She has directed numerous federal and state-funded, research projects and continues to pursue a rigorous consulting and research agenda in retirement.

Dr. Paula Smith is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of New Brunswick, Saint John in 2006. Her research interests include offender classification and assessment, correctional rehabilitation, the psychological effects of incarceration, program implementation and evaluation, the transfer of knowledge to practitioners and policy-makers, and meta-analysis. She is co-author of Corrections in the Community, and has also authored more than thirty journal articles and book chapters. Dr. Smith has directed numerous federal and state funded research projects, including studies of prisons, community-based correctional programs, juvenile drug courts, probation and parole departments, and mental health services. Furthermore, she has been involved in evaluations of more than 280 correctional programs throughout the United States. In addition to her research experience, Dr. Smith has considerable frontline experience working with a variety of offender populations, including juvenile offenders, sex offenders, and perpetrators of domestic violence.  Currently, she provides training and technical assistance to criminal justice agencies throughout the United States and Canada. Paula undertook her doctoral work in at the University of New Brunswick. She was previously a Research Associate with the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies at the University of New Brunswick. She has also been involved in the development and delivery of treatment programs to federal parolees with the Correctional Service of Canada. Her research interests include meta-analysis, the assessment of offender treatment and deterrence programs, the development of actuarial assessments for clinicians and managers in prisons and community corrections, the effects of prison life, treatment responsivity, and the transfer of knowledge to practitioners and policy makers. She has co-authored several articles, book chapters, and conference presentations on the above topics. She teaches Meta Analysis and the Psychology of Criminal Behavior.

Sarah M. Manchak is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. She received her Ph.D. in experimental psychopathology with a concentration in psychology and the law from the University of California, Irvine in 2011. Prior to that, she earned her MA in forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Dr. Manchak's research seeks to inform policy and interventions for offenders and individuals with serious mental illness and/or addiction.
 
Dr. Manchak teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels, is the coordinator of the undergraduate research program, runs the faculty-led study abroad program in Scotland, and is the academic advisor for the  undergraduate/university chapters of the Ohio Innocence Project, College Mentors for Kids, and the American Correctional Association.
 
To learn more, visit Dr. Manchak's website at www.cjimpactresearch.com.

Professor Anderson received her Ph.D. in community psychology from Michigan State University in 2015 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Indiana University School of Medicine prior to joining the faculty in 2016. The central focus of her research program is to understand juvenile corrections and victimization, and—more specifically—the circumstances and contexts in which these areas intersect. Given that framework, her research program includes two primary substantive areas of inquiry: (1) the juvenile justice system, and (2) the scope and impact of human trafficking. Her examination of these specific topics spans multiple ecological levels of analysis (e.g., individual, relational, environmental, socio-structural) and utilizes quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods approaches.
 
Dr. Anderson has recently served as the principal investigator on two funded studies: (1) a state-wide human trafficking prevalence study funded by the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services, (2) a study examining the health-related characteristics and context of girls in juvenile detention funded through Cincinnati Children’s CCTST Partnership Development Grant. She also served as the principal investigator on an American Psychological Association funded public policy grant examining gender-responsive practices in the juvenile justice system.  Her research is featured in a variety of criminal justice, public health, and psychology journals.