Kate K. O'Neill, PhD
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington as part of the Collective to Study the Broad Reach and Burden of Monetary Sanctions. My award-winning work has appeared in publications representative of my interdisciplinary focus, including Feminist Criminology, the Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Deviant Behavior, the Journal of Crime and Justice, and social psychology textbooks. My recent work on the community-level consequences of monetary sanctions has been published by the Russell Sage Foundation and featured in the Seattle Times.
I am a quantiative researcher whose body of work covers gender, racism, and the reproduction of inequalities in crime and punishment. I use self-report, social media, and administrative data to answer research questions about behavioral and cognitive development in adolescence, gangs, and legal financial punishments.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Education
PhD, the University of Washington, 2021
MA, the University of Washington, 2016
MSc, the London School of Economics and Political Science, 2010
BA, the Ohio University 2008
Research Publications
O’Neill, Kate K. 2023. “Mixed-Sex Peer Groups and ViolentDelinquency: Understanding the influence of mixed-sex peer groups, sex, and romance on violent delinquency.” The Journal of Crime and Justice.
O’Neill, Kate K., Tyler Smith, and Ian Kennedy. 2022. “County Dependence on Monetary Sanctions: Implications for Women’s Incarceration.” in RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. State Monetary Sanctions and the Costs of the Criminal Legal System, edited by A. Harris, M. Pattillo, and B. Sykes.
O’Neill, Kate K., Ian Kennedy, and Alexes Harris. 2021. “Debtors’ Blocks: How Monetary Sanctions Make Between Neighborhood Racial and Economic Inequalities Worse.” The Sociology of Race & Ethnicity. 8(1): 43-61.
Leverso, John, and Kate K. O’Neill. 2021. “Gang Membership and Victimization: How Gangs Facilitate Violent Victimization of Their Members.” Deviant Behavior. 43(9): 1103-1119.
O’Neill, Kate K. 2020. “The Adolescent Empathy Paradox and Juvenile Offending: Why Sex Differences in Empathic Ability Can Help Explain the Gender Gap in Juvenile Offending.” Feminist Criminology. 15(4): 410-437.
Matsueda, Ross L., Kate K. O’Neill, and Derek A. Kreager. 2020. “Embeddedness, Reflected Appraisals, and Deterrence: A Symbolic Interactionist Theory of Adolescent Theft.” in Symbolic Interaction: Deepening Foundations; Building Bridges, edited by R. Stryker, R. Serpe, and B. Powell. Springer.
Teaching Publications
O'Neill, Kate K. 2021. "Giving Students the Floor." Assignment published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington DC: American Sociological Association. (http://trails.asanet.org)
O'Neill, Kate K. 2020. "Women in the Social Structure." Syllabus published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology. Washington DC: American Sociological Association. (http://trails.asanet.org)
RESEARCH
ONGOING PROJECTS AND PAPERS: LEAD & CO-LEAD PROJECTS
The Broad Reach and Burden of the System of Monetary Sanctions
Postdoctoral Research Projects (Dr. Alexes Harris, PI)
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.
Transformations in Bad Girl Femininity: Girls in Gangs Online
Ongoing Research Project (Dr. John Leverso, collaborator)
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.
The Long-Term Consequences of Mixed-Sex Peer Groups: Offending
PhD Dissertation (Dr. Ross L. Matsueda, chair)
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.
MEDIA
SELECTED FEATURES ON PUBLIC-FACING RESEARCH
Counties That Rely on the Courts for Revenue Sentence More Women to Incarceration
by Kim Eckart
Op-ed: Lift the Burden of Legal Fines and Fees
by Kate K. O'Neill, Alexes Harris, & Ian Kennedy
TEACHING
Whether it's teaching anger management to men convicted of domestic violence, a new business process to Pentagon staffers, or sociological theory to undergraduates, I have always felt at home in the classroom. I believe everyone benefits when we create inclusive, challenging spaces for teaching and learning, and I proudly adhere to that philosophy in developing every lecture, training, discussion, and activity that makes it into my classroom.
Check out some of my sample materials, below, or contact me with requests for a full teaching résumé, teaching statements, or additional course materials.
Sample Syllabi
Click these links to download recent syllabi
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