Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at The Ohio State University. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in May 2023. In 2023–2024 I was a postdoctoral scholar in the Possibility Lab at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy.

My scholarship sits at the nexus of race, institutions, and political behavior, often focusing on the politics of the criminal legal system in the United States. One strand of my research demonstrates the institutional insulation of municipal police from public influence and democratic oversight; another considers questions of representation for racial and ethnic minorities. My work appears in the American Political Science Review, Political Psychology, and Political Behavior, and in the Oxford University Press book Deadly Justice.

Publications

  1. Willing but Unable: Reassessing the Relationship between Racial Group Consciousness and Black Political Participation, with Jasmine Carrera Smith, Jared Clemons, Miguel Martinez, Leann McLaren, and Ismail K. White. American Political Science Review (2024). [PDF]
    Abstract

    This article offers a framework for understanding when racial group consciousness (RGC) drives Black Americans toward costly political action. Drawing on ANES data and two behavioral experiments, we argue that RGC’s mobilizing power is conditional on whether an activity is relevant to a recognized racial-group outcome and on individuals’ capacity to bear its costs. RGC reliably predicts low-cost participation regardless of group relevance; for higher-cost action, however, highly group-conscious Black Americans engage chiefly when there is clear potential for racial-group benefit.

  2. Do At-Large Elections Reduce Black Representation? A New Baseline for County Legislatures, with Jason Douglas Todd and Curtis Bram. Electoral Studies (2024). [PDF]
    Abstract

    Black citizens tend to be descriptively underrepresented at every level of US government, yet the county legislature—a consequential but overlooked tier—has received little attention. Assembling new data on the composition of county governing boards in North Carolina, we establish a baseline for Black descriptive representation at this level and assess how electoral structure, particularly the use of at-large rather than district elections, shapes it.

  3. The Donor Went Down to Georgia: Out-of-District Donations and Rivalrous Representation, with Charles Nathan, Curtis Bram, and Jason Todd. Political Behavior (2024). [PDF]
    Abstract

    Most money in US congressional campaigns comes from donors outside the district, leading scholars to cast legislators who accept it as “surrogate representatives” for outsiders. We ask how a representative’s own geographic constituents react, arguing they feel forced to share their representative at the expense of their own representation. In survey experiments during the 2021 and 2022 Georgia Senate races, learning about out-of-district donations lowered constituents’ expectations of how much effort their senator would devote to them, with local identity moderating the effect—evidence of the rivalrous nature of representation.

  4. The Mobilizing Effects of Proposition 47 on High-Incarceration Communities. Political Psychology (2025). [PDF]
    Abstract

    Existing research disagrees about whether community exposure to the carceral state mobilizes or demobilizes nearby voters. I argue the missing link is whether voting is clearly connected to changing criminal-legal policy, and use California’s well-publicized 2014 Proposition 47—which reduced incarceration and lowered sanctions for nonviolent offenses—as a test. Using census-tract vote returns and incarceration rates, I find that higher tract incarceration is associated with increased turnout in the Proposition 47 election and with greater support for the reform measure.

  5. The Punitive Public? Exploring the Opinion–Election Connection in Criminal Justice Policy, with Curtis Bram and Charles Nathan. American Politics Research (2025). [PDF]
    Abstract

    A long tradition links US criminal-legal policy to public attitudes, with one proposed mechanism being a punitive public electing punitive politicians. Using three conjoint experiments, we show that citizens’ policy attitudes do not map neatly onto their electoral choices: respondents broadly agree about which classes of offenders most deserve release—across party and levels of racial resentment—but that consensus fractures along partisan and racial-resentment lines once the same choices are attached to hypothetical candidates. We argue scholars should focus more on the mechanisms connecting opinion to criminal-justice outcomes.

Working Papers

Work in Progress

Book

Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a comprehensive examination of the record established through 40 years of experience with the modern death penalty. The book asks whether the system the Supreme Court approved in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) has worked as intended, or whether caprice, bias, and arbitrariness continue to characterize its application — bringing empirical evidence to bear on cost, delay, geographic concentration, reversals, and botched executions.

The work was cited by the United States Supreme Court in Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in Jordan v. Mississippi (2018), and is used to teach Race, Innocence, and the End of the Death Penalty at UNC-Chapel Hill. Replication data and reviews are available online.

Law Review Articles & Chapters

  1. The Geographic Distribution of US Executions, with Frank R. Baumgartner, Wallace Gram, and Kaneesha Johnson. Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 11: 1–33 (2016).
    Abstract

    We review statistical patterns in the geographic distribution of US executions, compare them to homicides, and document an extreme and increasing degree of concentration in the modern period that is virtually uncorrelated with homicide-related factors. The distribution follows a pattern associated with self-reinforcing processes: a main determinant of whether an individual is executed is not the crime committed but the jurisdiction’s prior experience with executing others.

  2. The Transparency of Jail Data, with Will Crozier and Brandon Garrett. Wake Forest Law Review (2021).
    Abstract

    Using scraped daily pretrial data from Durham, North Carolina, we examine outcomes following 2019 bail-policy changes. The jail population declined sharply and aggregate pretrial conditions shifted. We also show why public data reporting only initial pretrial conditions cannot answer key questions about jail populations or released-population outcomes, and discuss the implications for bail reform.

  3. COVID-19, Race, and Mass Incarceration. Chapter 4 in COVID-19 and Racial Inequality, ed. Sandy Darity (2022).
    Abstract

    This chapter examines the relationship between COVID-19 and mass incarceration: how the pandemic affected pretrial detention and prison-release policies, the relatively small magnitude of population decreases, the elevated likelihood of contracting COVID-19 inside prisons, and how racialized mass incarceration contributed to racial inequality in the pandemic’s effects.

Public Writing

Teaching