About

Paul Hirschfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Criminal Justice Program at Rutgers University. He earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2003. His teaching areas include criminology, punishment and social control, and policing. His theoretical and empirical work focuses on social control and criminalization in relation to schools, policing, and inequality. His current research centers on the expansion of therapeutic and restorative alternatives to exclusionary discipline and school-based arrests, examining their implications for racial inequalities in school discipline and juvenile justice. He also studies key sources of international variation in deadly force by police, with a focus on the socio-legal factors influencing police use of deadly force in the United States and Latin America, including firearms, legal standards, police training, practices, and governance. Hirschfield has contributed to understanding the causes and consequences of intensified surveillance and criminalization, especially of youth, and has explored the impact of juvenile arrests on educational attainment. His work includes program evaluations supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the Spencer Foundation. His research has been published in various academic journals and featured in public outlets such as Foreign Affairs, the Huffington Post, and Salon.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Development economics
• Law
• Geography
• Economics

Selected publications

• Exceptionally Lethal: American Police Killings in a Comparative Perspective

  Annual Review of Criminology · 2022 · 71 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Police in the United States stand out in the developed world for their reliance on deadly force. Other nations in the Americas, however, feature higher or similar levels of fatal police violence (FPV). Cross-national comparative analyses can help identify stable and malleable factors that distinguish high-FPV from low-FPV countries. Two factors that clearly stand out among high-FPV nations are elevated rates of gun violence—which fosters a preoccupation with danger and wide latitude to use preemptive force—and ethnoracial inequality and discord. The latter seems to be tied to another fundamental difference between the United States and most other developed nations—the “radically decentralized structure of U.S. policing” ( Bayley & Stenning 2016 ). Hyperlocalism limits the influence of external oversight, along with expertise and resources for effective training, policy implementation, and accountability. However, elevated rates of FPV among some Latin American countries with relatively centralized policing demonstrate that decentralization is not a necessary condition for high FPV. Likewise, relatively low FPV in Spain and Chile suggests that achieving low FPV is also possible without the extensive resources and training that appear to suppress FPV in wealthy Northern European nations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• School Securitization and Its Alternatives: The Social, Political, and Contextual Drivers of School Safety Policy and Practice

  School Psychology Review · 2021-03-11 · 18 citations

  article

  A dramatic transformation of school safety practices in American public schools has occurred during the last four decades. Scholars have argued that exaggerated fears and moral panics over youth violence, changing perceptions and responses to various risks in schools and society, and broader neoliberal political agendas expanded the criminalization and securitization of schools. This article considers the utility of divergent explanations for school securitization and criminalization (and recent decriminalization and medicalization efforts), suggests potential opportunities for theoretical integration, and reviews research on the relationship between school context (such as crime rates, racial composition, population density, and resources) and school safety practices. Based on this analysis of the social, political, and contextual drivers of school safety and security, implications for future research, practice, and policy are discussed.Impact and ImplicationsThe sustained securitization of schools is an outgrowth of multiple social and political forces. By examining the onset as well as the ebbs and flows of these forces, this article reveals particular contexts and historical moments when (openings for) alternatives to securitization emerge or prevail. When fears and punitive sentiments are lessened and notions of risk are reconceptualized or redirected, school helping professionals may find new opportunities to expand school-based mental health and evidence-based violence prevention approaches.

  PublisherDOI

• 2. School Surveillance in America: Disparate and Unequal

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2020 · 42 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Schools Under Surveillance

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2020 · 19 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  Schools under Surveillance gathers together some of the very best researchers studying surveillance and discipline in contemporary public schools. Surveillance is not simply about monitoring or tracking individuals and their dataùit is about the structuring of power relations through human, technical, or hybrid control mechanisms. Essays cover a broad range of topics including police and military recruiters on campus, testing and accountability regimes such as No Child Left Behind, and efforts by students and teachers to circumvent the most egregious forms of surveillance in public education. Each contributor is committed to the continued critique of the disparity and inequality in the use of surveillance to target and sort students along lines of race, class, and gender.

  PublisherDOI

• Policing the Police: U.S. and European Models

  Journal of democracy · 2020-01-01 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  America’s hyperlocalized system of policing both upholds and corrodes democratic principles. Local control fosters responsiveness to local norms and preferences. However, local elites leverage greater power over public affairs to direct policing toward the enforcement of racial segregation and domination. Local financing incentivizes aggressive policing, while the ethos of local control leaves state and federal authorities ill-equipped to enforce constitutional standards. Centralized West European policing, by contrast, emphasizes uniform national (or state-wide) standards in pursuit of equality and international human-rights obligations. Although full administrative centralization is a non-starter in the United States, U.S. citizens crave centralized enforcement of rules against abusive policing.

  PublisherDOI

• Examining the School-to-Prison Pipeline Metaphor

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice · 2018-06-25 · 18 citations

  reference-entrySenior author

  The school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) is a commonly used metaphor that was developed to describe the many ways in which schools have become a conduit to the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The STPP metaphor encompasses various disciplinary policies and practices that label students as troublemakers, exclude students from school, and increase their likelihood of involvement in delinquency, juvenile justice, and subsequent incarceration. Many external forces promote these policies and practices, including high-stakes testing, harsh justice system practices and penal policies, and federal laws that promote the referral of certain school offenses to law enforcement. Empirical research confirms some of the pathways posited by STPP. For example, research has shown that out-of-school suspensions predict school dropout, justice system involvement and adult incarceration. However, research on some of the posited links, such as the impact of school-based arrests and referrals to court on school dropout, is lacking. Despite gaps in the empirical literature and some theoretical shortcomings, the term has gained widespread acceptance in both academic and political circles. A conference held at Northeastern University in 2003 yielded the first published use of the phrase. Soon, it attained widespread prominence, as various media outlets as well as civil rights and education organizations (e.g., ACLU, the Advancement Project (they also use “schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track”), the National Education Association (NEA), and the American Federation of Teachers) referenced the term in their initiatives. More recently, the Obama administration used the phrase in their federal school disciplinary reform efforts. Despite its widespread use, the utility of STPP as a social scientific concept and model is open for debate. Whereas some social scientists and activists have employed STPP to highlight how even non-criminal justice institutions can contribute to over-incarceration, other scholars are critical of the concept. Some scholars feel that the pipeline metaphor is too narrow and posits an overly purposeful or mechanistic link between schools and prisons; in fact, there is a much more complicated relationship that includes multiple stakeholders that fail our nation’s youth. Rather than viewing school policies and practices in isolation, critical scholars have argued that school processes of criminalization and exclusion are inextricably linked to poverty, unemployment, and the weaknesses of the child welfare and mental health systems. In short, the metaphor does not properly capture the web of institutional forces and missed opportunities that can push youth toward harmful choices and circumstances, often resulting in incarceration. Many reforms across the nation seek to dismantle STPP, including non-exclusionary discipline alternatives such as restorative justice and limiting the role of school police officers. Rigorous research on their effectiveness is needed.

  PublisherDOI

• Trends in School Social Control in the United States: Explaining Patterns of Decriminalization

  2018-01-01 · 16 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Schools in Sustaining Juvenile Justice System Inequality

  The Future of Children · 2018-01-01 · 49 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Childrens school experiences may contribute in many ways to disproportionate minority contact with the juvenile justice system, writes Paul Hirschfield. For example, research shows that black students who violate school rules are more often subject to out-of-school suspensions, which heighten their risk of arrest and increase the odds that once accused of delinquency, they'll be detained, formally processed, and institutionalized for probation violations. Hirschfield examines two types of processes through which schools may contribute to disproportionate minority contact with the justice system. <i>Micro-level</i> processes affect delinquents at the individual level, either because they're distributed unevenly by race/ethnicity or because they affect youth of color more adversely. For example, suspensions can be a micro-level factor if biased principals suspend more black youth than white youth. <i>Macro-level</i> processes, by contrast, operate at the classroom, school, or district level. For example, if predominantly black school districts are more likely than predominantly white districts to discipline students by suspending them, black students overall will be adversely affected, even if each district applies suspensions equitably within its own schools. Some policies and interventions, if properly targeted and implemented, show promise for helping schools reduce their role in justice system inequality, Hirschfield writes. One is school-based restorative justice practices like conferencing and peacemaking circles, which aim to reduce misbehaviors by resolving conflicts, improving students' sense of connection to the school community, and reinforcing the legitimacy of school authorities. Another is Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, a multi-tiered, team-based intervention framework that has proven to be effective in reducing disciplinary referrals and suspensions, particularly in elementary and middle schools. However, he notes, if successful programs like these are more accessible to well-off schools or to white students, they may actually exacerbate inequality, even as they reduce suspension for blacks.

  PublisherDOI

• Schools and Crime

  Annual Review of Criminology · 2017-10-02 · 98 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This review focuses on recent advancements along two lines of criminological inquiry. The first examines how schools unintentionally influence off-campus delinquency, especially through their effects on social bonds and strain. The second examines the effects of intensified school punishment and policing on both school safety and off-campus offending. The key variables of interest to both fields of inquiry are fundamentally endogenous, which has led to some theoretical stagnation in the field. However, studies that employ quasi-experimental methods have improved causal inferences regarding the effects of additional schooling (especially in good schools) and the criminogenic effects of school exclusion. The effects of school failure and educational expectations are ripe for similar analyses. A rigorous interdisciplinary research agenda is proposed to assess the impact of decriminalizing school discipline and expanding therapeutic and restorative disciplinary alternatives to better inform the efforts underway across the United States to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline while maintaining school safety.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Problem Behavior in the Middle School Years: An Assessment of the Social Development Model

  2017-07-05 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  The Social Development Model (SDM) is a life course theory that integrates several extant criminological theories to specify the interactive social processes that lead to prosocial and antisocial behavior. Relatively little research has attempted to cross-validate this and other developmental theories of delinquency. The current study assesses the school and family processes that comprise SDM with a sample of Chicago public school students measured over three school years between fifth and eighth grades (n — 2,014). The data draw on student surveys tapping into multiple domains relevant to the explanation of problem behavior. Although overall model fit was marginal, the results of structural equation models largely support the SDM and its constituent paths. The implications for theoretical development and intervention are considered.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jens Ludwig

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  7 shared

• Greg J. Duncan

  4 shared

• Hans Toch

  4 shared

• W. A. Thompson

  University of British Columbia

  4 shared

• Catherine Mayer

  Case Western Reserve University

  4 shared

• Lindsay Taggart-Rutherford

  University of Pennsylvania

  4 shared

• Alice Goffman

  University of Pennsylvania

  4 shared

• Frank F. Furstenberg

  University of Pennsylvania

  4 shared