Dr. Jeffrey Lin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology at the University of Denver. His research interests include crime, corrections, inequality, media coverage, and quantitative methods.
Professor Lin focuses on the complex interactions between institutions and individuals in the criminal justice system. In particular, Professor Lin is interested in the ways that criminal outcomes are impacted by systemic arrangements of policy and practice. Using quantitative and comparative methods, he has examined these dynamics among juvenile offenders, parolees, and sex offenders, and through analyses of media coverage of serious crime and the effects of large-scale changes to state correctional policies.
Professor Lin received his PhD in Sociology from New York University in 2005. His dissertation research explored court decisions to incarcerate juvenile offenders in New York City, as well as the impact of incarceration on the criminal behaviors of these young offenders. After completing his dissertation, Professor Lin served as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine, where he studied issues related to the reform of California’s adult prison and parole systems. Since coming to DU, he has continued to research correctional reform in California. He has also been working with the State of Colorado to evaluate the effectiveness of new strategies of supervising offenders in the community, and he has studied the management of sex offenders in Colorado, assessing the utility of laws designed to control their continued offending.