This work links multiple administrative datasets from state and national organizations to build on prior scholarship on the disproportionate distribution of monetary sanctions and their community-level consequences. Working under UW’s Alexes Harris, as well as PIs at the University of Minnesota, Arizona State University, and the University of Georgia, I am currently leading research projects on age and the distribution of misdemeanor and civil penalties; long-term trends in jurisdictional monetary sanction dependence; the stigmatization of Indigenous defendants through restitution; and racialized wealth extraction.

This mixed-methods research uses web-scraped Facebook data on over 20,000 users and 140,000 interactions from a since-banned Chicago-area gang-affiliated online group to examine how girls and women reproduce and challenge gang culture and dynamics through their online personas and interactions. We call on social networking, social media, feminist theory, and gang literatures to theorize opportunities for girls and women’s entry into this hostile, male-dominated, stigmatized space; identify adaptive behaviors of successful female group members; and highlight the means through which girls and women are placed in marginalized and defensive positions in this unique online environment.

This work uses gender, feminist, and developmental theories to examine long-term continuities in behavior and preference as a product of the sex composition of adolescent peer groups. Guided by gender theory on child and adolescent development and heteronormativity, I argue the transition from the same-sex culture of childhood (see: Maccoby 1998; Thorne 1993) to a mixed-sex culture in adolescence is a key site of socialization with regards to gender preferences and delinquent behavior. Subsequently, time spent in such groups in adolescence is predictive of a wide range of young adult behaviors – including selection into sex-segregated career tracts, substance abuse, and violent offending. Ongoing work builds on my recent publication on Mixed-sex peer groups and violent delinquency: understanding the separate and combined influence of mixed-sex peer groups, sex, and romance on violent delinquency (O’Neill 2023), and extends findings on delinquency and mixed-sex peer groups to long-term employment and offending outcomes for young adults.