Joshua Kaiser, J.D. Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor of Sociology. As a sociologist, criminologist, and legal scholar, he studies the reciprocal relationship between state power and intersectional inequalities across time and place. His research thus far has analyzed the multidimensional (racial, gendered, and criminal) experience of genocide in Darfur and elsewhere; the sectarian displacement, criminal entrepreneurship, and legal cynicism caused by the Iraq War; and the ways in which the American penal system continually legitimizes and reinforces race, class, and other inequalities by reifying social stereotypes and assumptions into law.

Dr. Kaiser will assemble and analyze a novel dataset of penal policies in order to answer enduring questions about how punishment produces socioeconomic inequalities among individuals, families, and communities in the United States. In particular, the project will analyze a comprehensive dataset of patterns in U.S. “hidden sentence” law, a subset of U.S. penal law whose origins and historical trajectory remain prohibitively difficult to ascertain using traditional methods of legal history. Using this new dataset, the project will answer three previously theorized but unanswered questions about punishment and socioeconomic inequalities: (1) to what extent formal mechanisms of penal exclusion (i.e., hidden sentences) are causally relevant to social inequalities in individuals, families, and communities, (2) how important formal exclusion is relative to informal exclusion from social stigma and discrimination, and (3) to what extent such penal inequalities are limited to formally incarcerated people or applicable to the overall—much larger—population of criminalized Americans.