Events

Get involved and join the conversation. The Deason Center is building a network of researchers, advocates, impacted communities, policymakers, students, and stakeholders committed to criminal justice reform. To create meaningful connections within this vast and diverse group, the Deason Center regularly hosts free virtual and in-person events. Want to be notified of future opportunities to engage? Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss an event announcement.

Upcoming Events

  • The Impact of Working Conditions on Productivity

    Date: November 19, 2025

    Time: 2:00 PM

    Public defenders provide essential legal representation to people who cannot afford an attorney. Yet, they do so under notoriously heavy caseloads, raising important questions about how workload affects the delivery of justice.

    As part of a larger study on public defense, Dr. Amy Mahler analyzed case records from two U.S. states and examined how strict case assignment rules created natural variation in attorney workloads. Her research also incorporated detailed time-use data to better understand how public defenders allocated their limited resources across different tasks.

    Dr. Mahler’s research sheds light on the connection between workloads and case outcomes in public defense and explores what these connections mean for ensuring fair and high-quality, effective representation.

Past Events

  • Evaluating the Implementation and Impact of Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act

    Date: July 30, 2025

    Time: 2:00 PM

    On September 18, 2023, Illinois implemented the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA). This landmark reform eliminated cash bail and introduced sweeping changes to the state’s pretrial system. The PFA establishes new release and detention factors, restricts pretrial detention, and limits post-release modification of release conditions.

    Professors David Olson and Don Stemen of Loyola University’s Center for Criminal Justice will share findings from their ongoing, long-term evaluation of the PFA’s implementation. They will also highlight variations in the PFA’s implementation and impact across urban and rural Illinois jurisdictions.

  • Misdemeanor Waivers of Counsel

    Date: June 18, 2025

    Time: 2:00 PM

    An initial appearance is often the first—and sometimes the only—courtroom proceeding for misdemeanor defendants. The purpose of this proceeding is to inform arrested people about the chargers and advise them about their constitutional rights so that they can make knowing, intelligent, and voluntary legal decisions, including whether to waive their right to counsel and their right to trial.

    As part of a larger study about the waiver of rights, Amanda Izes and Professor Alisa Smith observed misdemeanor arraignments, analyzed hearing transcripts and interviewed defendants who waived their right to counsel and pleaded guilty.

    Their research reveals that misdemeanor arraignment proceedings are highly structured performances, dominated by highly structured interactions between judges and defendants. The authors also propose simple behavioral and procedural changes that could ensure access to justice and due process of law. 

  • Assembly Line Public Defense

    Date: January 16, 2025

    Public defense in the United States is not just underfunded but also understudied. In their forthcoming article, David Abrams and Priyanka Goonetilleke empirically examine, for the first time, an essential question about public defense: What difference does vertical representation make?
     
    Criminal justice advocates, scholars, and the American Bar Association strongly favor vertical representation—where a single public defender represents a defendant throughout their case—over horizontal representation, where different attorneys handle different stages.
     
    This article provides the first empirical analysis of how attorney continuity affects criminal case outcomes. Using a natural experiment created by the Defender Association of Philadelphia’s transition from horizontal to partially vertical representation, the authors provide the first empirical analysis of how attorney continuity affects criminal case outcomes.

  • Research Innovation in Action: Rural Criminal Practice

    Date: October 12, 2023

    The Deason Center hosts Dr. Kevin Scott, interim director of the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, for a discussion with researchers and practitioners about gathering data in rural court systems. Dr. Scott will be joined by:

    • Kristen Staley, Executive Director of the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission
    • Christian Mash, State’s Attorney for Garrett County, MD
    • Melissa Mackey, Research Director for the New York State Office of Indigent Legal Services

    The panel, moderated by Deason Center Research Director Dr. Andrew Davies, will discuss challenges and solutions when gathering data on courts, defense services, and prosecutors in rural jurisdictions.

    This event is part of the Deason Center's STAR (Small, Tribal, and Rural) Justice Series. This series seeks to highlight an array of distinctive criminal justice issues affecting small, tribal, and rural areas across the United States.

  • Race, Place, and Over-Prosecution: The Impact of Residency on Case-Processing and Cumulative Disadvantage

    Date: September 27, 2023

    The over-policing of communities of color has been at the forefront of social and criminal justice reform movements in recent years. The desire to address policing in the U.S. is closely linked to the proliferation of officer-involved shootings of, and physical altercations with, Black men and women. Notably, less attention has been given to the over-prosecution of these groups.

    While prosecutors have the ability to divert individuals away from justice system involvement, over-policing of some communities may have indirect effects on the likelihood of prosecution. Merely living in a particular zip code may increase an individual’s chances of criminal justice contact. Given the emphasis on efficiency in case processing, this may lead to compounded disadvantage for defendants, particularly for those from communities experiencing the greatest socioeconomic and structural deficits. 

    This study examines the impact of residency on over-prosecution. Specifically, this project identifies sociocultural characteristics of over-prosecuted communities, clarifies offenses most commonly over-prosecuted, and explores whether policies can mitigate these issues, with particular attention given mitigation of non-violent drug and gun possession offenses.

  • "Inclusive Criminology" with Professor Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill, a Special Event in Collaboration with IDRA

    Date: July 14, 2023

    Inclusive criminology (“IC”) emphasizes comprehension through diversity and inclusivity in researchers' subject populations and contexts, theoretical perspectives, research questions, methodological techniques, and practical aims.

    In this webinar, Professor Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill explains the IC approach, reviews its growing body of research, and provides examples of its use in theoretical and applied science. He connects IC to larger discourses on demographic and identity diversity and inclusion, including in empirical legal scholarship and indigent defense research. Finally, Professor Blount-Hill introduces epistemic justice as a moral and ethical basis for inclusive criminology.

    The Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center and the Indigent Defense Research Association (IDRA) are collaborating to bring this special event.

  • Rethinking Rural Recidivism: System Navigation Problems and the Myth of the Revolving Door

    Date: June 21, 2023

    Presented by Dr. Jennifer Schwartz and Dr. Jennifer Sherman (Washington State University)

    Mass incarceration has increasingly become a rural phenomenon. To learn more about the causes and consequences of rural incarceration, the authors conducted a mixed methods study across six counties in rural Washington State. Contrary to local perceptions that jails acted as “revolving doors” for drug addicts and serious felons, quantitative analyses of jail data (2015-2019) showed that a large proportion of jail stays were due to minor offenses like missed court dates, noncompliance with release conditions, unpaid fines, and/or offenses related to driving with a suspended license.

    The authors dub this constellation of charges system navigation problems (SNPs), which were responsible for a plurality of pretrial incarcerations and jail re-entries. The authors argue that SNP charges work to criminalize rural poverty and marginality through both financial and non-financial means. This study highlights the importance of place-based dimensions of social inequalities, illustrating how rurality intersects with net-widening legal practices to contribute to jail use and mass incarceration.

  • Place-Based Advocacy and Judging in Rural Areas

    Date: March 29, 2023

    In the United States, rural economic marginalization and corresponding gaps in employment, affordable housing, health care, nutrition, and education put individuals at high risk for legal need. Yet many rural regions are “legal deserts” with few, if any, attorneys, and prevailing access to justice initiatives tend to neglect the unique challenges posed by rurality.

    The efforts of rural tribal and state court judges, though often overlooked in scholarship and policy, offer a compelling response to this inequitable access to justice context. Building on emergent work on “active judging,” or when judges step away from a traditional passive role to assist unrepresented parties, Professor Statz explores how rural place and place attachments shape diverse judges’ interactions with litigants. It draws on mixed-methodological research across seven tribal and state courts in the upper Midwest to shed light on rural judges’ efforts, how these efforts are regarded by unrepresented parties, and to what extent a shared experience of rurality provides a meaningful form of “access.” In so doing, it offers a novel spatial intervention in scholarship on access to justice and active judging and contributes to more rurally relevant justice practices.

    Professor Michele Statz is an anthropologist of law at the University of Minnesota who specializes in rural access to justice. Her current work examines how socio-spatial dimensions of rurality influence legal advocacy, rights mobilization, and individual and community health in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin.

  • The Myth of Individualized Prosecutorial Enforcement

    Date: March 8, 2023

    Although prosecutors wield immense discretionary power to determine how the justice system will respond to allegations of criminal activity, they have traditionally not faced meaningful scrutiny or accountability for how they exercise their discretion. Yet over the past several years, prosecutors and the roles they play in charging have become enmeshed in political controversy. Voters have elected dozens of prosecutors running on reformist platforms. And conventional prosecutors, of course, are fighting back.

    Professor Murray calls one key idea in these debates the myth of individualized enforcement. That’s the idea that enforcement decisions have traditionally hinged on case-specific factors relating to the offense and the offender rather than categorical policies or criteria and, thus, are essentially apolitical. Professor Murray argues that this widely disseminated idea is mistaken.

  • Weeding out Racial Disparity: Dallas DA Declination Policies

    Date: February 9, 2023

    In 2019, District Attorney John Creuzot vowed to end the rampant racial disparity in marijuana enforcement. As a result, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office (Dallas DAO) issued policies designed to radically decrease police enforcement of misdemeanor marijuana possession laws. The authors review pre- and post-reform data about the number of marijuana misdemeanor cases that police submitted to the Dallas DAO for prosecution.

     

    The authors conclude that the Dallas DAO’s policies were associated with a significant decrease in the number of marijuana misdemeanors referred by local police. However, those policies were not associated with a similar reduction in the degree of racial disparity among the cases submitted. Indeed, racial disparity in marijuana enforcement actually increased in some places.

               

    Drawing on other research about prosecutorial charging discretion, the authors situate their findings in the context of other progressive prosecution initiatives and offer insights about the conditions necessary for success.

  • Compromising the Social Contract

    Date: January 25, 2023

     is an Assistant Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. 

    Professor Hill’s teaching and research lie at the intersection of critical race theory and criminal justice policy. His forthcoming publication in the UCLA Law Review specifically examines bail reform and pretrial risk assessment instruments through a critical race lens. Prior to joining OSU Moritz College of Law, Professor Hill was a Law Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center, where he led a seminar on the racial implications of algorithmic risk assessment.

  • Unwarranted Warrants: An Empirical Analysis of the Search and Seizure Process

    Date: November 3, 2022

    The Criminal Justice Reform Workshop "Unwarranted Warrants: An Empirical Analysis of the Search and Seizure Process" was hosted by the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center on November 3, 2022. The workshop was presented by Prof. Miguel de Figueiredo, Prof. Dane Thorley, and Prof. Brett Hashimoto.