Core Department Faculty Member

Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Criminal Justice Program, Paul Hirschfield teaches criminology, punishment and social control, and policing. His theoretical and empirical work focuses on social control and criminalization in relation to schools, policing, and inequality. His current research centers on the expansion of therapeutic and restorative alternatives to exclusionary discipline and school-based arrests and its implications for racial inequalities in school discipline and juvenile justice. He also examines key sources of international variation in deadly force by the police.

Professor Hirschfield has focused on the causes and consequences of intensified surveillance and criminalization, especially of youth. His past research focused on the impact of juvenile arrests on educational attainment, as well policies and programs that facilitate the transition from correctional to community educational settings. In recent years, he has shifted his focus to the expansion of alternatives to exclusionary discipline and school-based arrests, as mentioned above. He has become a recognized expert on the various socio-legal underpinnings of high rates of deadly force in the United States and Latin America including the salience of firearms, permissive legal standards, police training and practices, and localized police governance.

In addition to the above areas of expertise, Dr. Hirschfield has helped design or conduct multiple program evaluations. He participated in separate experimental evaluations of the impact of the Moving to Opportunity program and the Comer School Development Program on rates of juvenile court involvement. With support from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (U.S. Department of Justice) and the Spencer Foundation, Hirschfield conducted a study of the impact of mainstream and alternative school re-enrollment on the reentry success of young ex-offenders in New York City. His work has appeared in Criminology, Sociology of Education, Theoretical Criminology, Journal of Democracy, Annual Review of Criminology, and elsewhere.