Faculty

Edward J. Latessa, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus (In Memoriam)
 
Our leader, Dr. Edward J. Latessa, passed away peacefully on January 11, 2022 at his home in Cincinnati, Ohio surrounded by his family, wife, sister, and children.
 
A man of contrasts, Ed was stern but caring, loud but gentle, an Ohio State fan but a UC builder. He was, as his close friend Larry Johnson often says, the hard-shelled candy with the soft middle.
 
Ed was a born leader who helped build this great program. He had a presence. Chutzpah even. He commanded your attention and you were happy to give it to him. He owned every room he stepped into. He was equal parts intellectual, philosopher, and pragmatist. And he was funny. Really funny.
 
He was your best friend. Or at least that's how it felt being near him. Sharing a meal with Ed was both a rite of passage and a treat to savor. Sitting beside him at an event, no matter how serious, was always a risk worth taking. The risk lie in the fact that his inner comedian never took a night off. He could make you laugh out loud at the most inappropriate times.  And he had a bullshit detector that he was never afraid to vocalize.
 
Ed was a family man. He spoke often and lovingly of his family, and he always asked (and remembered) the details of your own family. He kept toys and candy in his office, hoping for little visitors. He readily dispensed important wisdom. He’d often remind those around him that careers are marathons not sprints; no need to miss anything important along the way.
 
Ed understood human behavior better than anyone - like he was told secrets no one else knew. He could cut right to the heart of an issue like a skilled butcher, accomplishing in minutes what might take a trained professional several weeks to achieve. And he could motivate you with the simplest and slightest gestures.
 
Whether those skills were God given, instilled during his upbringing in Youngstown, or earned over time we never figured out. When asked he would demure, in his classic way, with a pithy remark like, "it ain't that hard."
 
What is remarkable is not that he had these abilities; rather, it is remarkable that he chose to use them consistently in such positive ways. Propped up by his skills, Ed helped build one of the best doctoral programs in the country. He also created an intricate research and training program that has led to untold reductions in harm and improvements to public safety. And he trained dozens of other scholars and practitioners along the way. His intellectual and professional legacy will live on through his contributions to the professionalization of rehabilitation and corrections in Ohio, the US, and around the world.
 
There will never be another one like him.

A memorial service is currently being planned for Sat., March 12, 2022. Updates will be posted here:
https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/edlatessa

Ed's obituary can be read here:
https://www.cincinnati.com/obituaries/cen210298

History of Ed Latessa’s Career, Interview by Alex Holsinger, ACJS Criminology Project, 2017 (51.12):
https://www.criminologystories.com/edwardlatessa

Latessa Retirement Video, Aug. 2020 (5:04): 
https://youtu.be/NkEUcxopt2o

Celebrating Ed Latessa, Nov. 2020 (30:25):
https://youtu.be/6RUdO-rLVbA

Dr. Christina Alicia Campbell is a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Campbell earned a B.A. from San Diego State University in 2006 and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Michigan State University in 2012. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry, Division of Prevention and Community Research at Yale University in 2014. Her passion for research was cultivated as a Ronald E. McNair Scholar and National Institutes of Health, Minority Biomedical Research Support (MBRS) Scholar.

Dr. Campbell's primary research interests include delinquency prevention, risk assessment, juvenile justice, child welfare policy, and reducing racial disparities in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Dr. Campbell has over 35 research publications. Her research has been published in various peer-reviewed academic journals, including Criminology Public Policy, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Child and Youth Services Review, Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Traumatic Stress, and Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice.

Dr. Campbell has received funding support for her research from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Justice, and the National Science Foundation. Funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), her last grant addressed race and sentencing disparities for youth involved in the juvenile justice system. Dr. Campbell is an NIJ W.E.B. Dubois research fellow and a member of the American Psychological Association, Society for Community Research and Action, American Society of Criminology, and the Racial Democracy, Crime & Justice Network. Dr. Campbell teaches juvenile justice, criminal justice, corrections, and psychology courses.

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 (prison crowding, prison programs, 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 a randomized controlled trial of the effectiveness of a new reentry prison program in Ohio for facilitating successful reentry (funded by NIJ), the relative effects of halfway houses and community based correctional facilities for reducing recidivism (funded by Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services), the use and impacts of restrictive housing in Ohio prisons (with Josh Cochran; funded by NIJ), and sources of stress among correctional officers in Kentucky (with Kristin Swartz at the University of Louisville). Published books include Understanding Prison Violence (co-authored with Ben Steiner; Taylor and Francis, 2020), The Oxford Handbook of Prisons and Imprisonment (co-edited with Paula Smith; Oxford University Press, 2018), and Forty Studies that Changed Criminal Justice, 2nd edition (co-authored with Amy Thistlethwaite; Pearson, 2013). Journal articles in the last five years have appeared in Annual Review of Criminology, Crime and Delinquency, Criminology, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Criminal Justice, 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 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.

Dr. Valerie Anderson is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati (UC). Professor Anderson is a community psychologist by training, receiving her Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 2015. Her approach to research is characterized by utilizing multiple methods to conduct interdisciplinary, community-engaged research to understand system responses to youth offending and victimization, and—more specifically—the circumstances and contexts in which these areas intersect. Her research program includes two substantive areas of inquiry: (1) system-involved youth and responses, and (2) experiences of victimization and trauma (with a primary focus on human trafficking). Given Dr. Anderson's background in community psychology, her examination of these specific topics spans multiple levels of analysis (e.g., individual, relational, environmental, socio-structural), cross-disciplinary theoretical perspectives, and multiple methodological approaches—relying on primary data collection and community-based collaborations with relevant agencies.

Dr. Anderson has served as the principal investigator on numerous studies funded externally by the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services, the Society for Community Research and Action, and internally through UC's Office of Research and the Center for Clinical & Translational Science & Training. Her recent research has been published in a variety of criminal justice (e.g., Criminal Justice and Behavior, Crime and Delinquency, Criminology & Public Policy, and Justice Evaluation Journal), public health (e.g., American Journal of Public Health, Pediatrics, Journal of Adolescent Health), and psychology (e.g., American Journal of Community Psychology) journals.