About

Scott Duxbury is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His areas of interest include Computational Social Science, Criminology, Social Networks, the Sociology of Punishment, Media and Technology, Quantitative Methods, Race and Racism, and Public Opinion. He is involved in teaching, research, and departmental leadership, contributing to the academic community through his expertise in these fields.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Criminology
• Law
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Statistics
• Demographic economics
• Algorithm
• Econometrics
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Replication Code for: Micro Effects on Macro Structure: Identification, Interpretation, Mediation, and Sensitivity Analysis for Model Choice

  Harvard Dataverse · 2026-03-20

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication Code for: Micro Effects on Macro Structure: Identification, Interpretation, Mediation, and Sensitivity Analysis for Model Choice.

  PublisherDOI

• A Threatening Tone: Homicide, Racial Threat Narratives, and the Historical Growth of Incarceration in the United States, 1926–2016

  UNC Libraries · 2025-04-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study evaluates how homicide, racial threat, and media discourse interacted to shape the timing and persistence of prison growth in the United States. Drawing on Blumer’s classic work, I argue that media discourse circulates threat narratives that portray racial minorities as either economically, politically, or criminally threatening. Criminal threat narratives increase in response to highly salient crimes, like homicide, and exert institutionally specific pressures that increase incarceration. To evaluate these claims, I use machine learning to classify 1,026,862 news articles in accordance with economic, political, and criminal threat themes in a time series analysis of the national incarceration rate between 1926 and 2016. Results reveal that the period of prison growth is characterized by an influx of criminal threat narratives that coincides with increases in the homicide rate. Criminal threat narratives and the homicide rate both have sizable long-term effects on the incarceration rate, whereas economic and political threat narratives have little explanatory power. Further analyses show that criminal threat narratives account for roughly half of the effect of the homicide rate on incarceration, and that the homicide rate has an indirect effect on racial disparity in prison admissions by acting through criminal threat narratives. These findings support core theoretical claims and expand our understanding of the complex interaction between racial threat and homicide in the historical rise of incarceration.

  PublisherDOI

• The Past and Present of Crime Research in Social Forces: How the Sociology of Crime Lost its Roots—And Found Them Again

  UNC Libraries · 2025-04-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The centennial of Social Forces provides an opportunity to examine change and stability in crime research in one of sociology’s oldest journals. Since the first issue of Social Forces in 1922, crime and punishment have transitioned from marginal topics subsumed under the umbrella of deviance studies to a central research area. This essay traces the intellectual development of crime research as captured in Social Forces’ pages and contrasts it with the growing independence of criminology as an academic field. To do so, I employ two analyses. First, I examine the topical classifications provided by Moody, Edelmann and Light (2022). Second, I expand upon these classifications by using structural topic models (STM) to detect clusters of crime research activity in Social Forces’ abstracts and group them into “eras” of crime research. The analysis reveals a circular development of crime research in Social Forces that reflects broader trends in the sociology of crime. 1 Themes of power, stratification, and punishment oriented early studies on crime. Research attention focused on inequality within the justice system, the effects of juvenile justice contact on criminal labeling and recidivism, and inequalities resulting from justice system contact. However, as crime rates rose throughout the Western world, Social Forces articles sought to explain the causes of crime and evaluate policies designed to cull the crime wave. In recent decades, persistent crime declines combined with growing concern with an oversized prison system have refocused attention on incarceration and its collateral consequences, especially for adolescent well-being and racial and class inequalities. In this way, crime research in Social Forces has returned to core themes of power and stratification that motivated early work in the sociology of crime. It has also distanced itself from individual etiology and policy studies that once dominated the journal’s pages and that continue to appear in specialist outlets.

  PublisherDOI

• The Boys in Blue Are Watching You: The Shifting Metropolitan Landscape and Big Data Police Surveillance in the United States

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Despite decades of crime decline, police surveillance has continued to expand through a range of tactics oriented towards policing social disadvantage. Yet, despite attention to the linkages between residential inequality and policing, few studies have accounted for two intertwined structural developments since the turn of the 21st century: (1) the shift away from spatially concentrated patterns of racial segregation within urban centers towards sprawling patterns of economic segregation and (2) the turn from reactive policing towards proactive surveillance. Using the case of big data policing, we create a new measure of big data surveillance in metropolitan areas to examine how changes in segregation have affected the expansion of proactive police surveillance. In contrast to theoretical accounts emphasizing the role of police surveillance in governing economic inequality and perpetuating racial segregation, we do not find evidence that racial segregation or income inequality increase big data surveillance. Instead, much of the recent rise in big data policing is explained by increases in sprawling patterns of income segregation. These results provide new insight into the linkages between policing and residential inequality and reveal how changes in metropolitan segregation influence criminal justice surveillance in the era of big data.

  PublisherDOI

• The Risk Creates the Reward: Reputational Returns to Legal and Quality Risks in Online Illegal Drug Trade

  Sociological Science · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Although buyers in unregulated markets depend heavily on reputational information in the absence of state oversight, few studies examine how the riskiness of a good may condition reputational effects on prices. We capitalize on novel data on 10,465 illegal drug exchanges on one online 'darknet' illegal drug market and computational text analysis to evaluate how distinct types of legal and quality risks moderate reputational effects on illegal drug prices. Our results suggest that quality risk considerations are especially acute, where the effect of numeric sales ratings and the sentiment expressed in sales review text are both increased for non-prescription drugs and attenuated for prescription drugs. In contrast, we find limited evidence that legal risks moderate reputational effects on illegal drug prices. These results underscore the importance of quality risks in illegal purchasing decisions, identify quality risk as a determinant of reputational premiums for illegal drug prices, and shed light on how the riskiness of a specific good can guide economic action in unregulated trade settings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Who Controls Criminal Law? Racial Threat and the Adoption of State Sentencing Law, 1975 to 2012

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Threat theory argues that states toughen criminal laws to repress the competitive power of large minority groups. Yet, research on threat suffers from a poor understanding of why minority group size contributes to social control and a lack of evidence on whether criminal law is uniquely responsive to the political interests of majority racial groups at all. By compiling a unique state-level dataset on 230 sentencing policy changes during mass incarceration and using data from 257,362 responses to 79 national surveys to construct new state-level measures of racial differences in punitive policy support, I evaluate whether criminal sentencing law is uniquely responsive to white public policy interests. Pooled event history models and mediation analyses support three primary conclusions: (1) states adopted new sentencing policies as a nonlinear response to minority group size, (2) sentencing policies were adopted in response to white public, but not black public, support for punitive crime policy, and (3) minority group size and race-specific homicide victimization both indirectly affect sentencing policy by increasing white public punitive policy support. These findings support key theoretical propositions for the threat explanation of legal change and identify white public policy opinion as a mechanism linking minority group size to variation in criminal law.

  PublisherDOI

• Why are state prison populations shrinking? A research note

  Criminology · 2025-02-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract After four decades of explosive growth, the US imprisonment rate began to inch downward in 2008. Despite fostering extensive public and policy debate, we know surprisingly little about why state imprisonment rates are declining. Although prior studies have examined correlates of decreases in imprisonment, it is currently unknown how much of the observed decrease in state prison populations can be attributed to decreases in the crime rate since its peak in the 1990s, as opposed to successful criminal sentencing reforms. This study uses new data on state sentencing reform policies in a decomposition of annual changes in state imprisonment rates between 1970 and 2019. Decreases in the property crime rate can account for 43%–60% of the observed decrease in the annual change in state imprisonment rates, whereas sentencing reforms account for another 12%–16%. Sentencing reforms have had their largest effects in the Midwest and South but have not contributed to decreases in the annual change in state imprisonment rates in the Northeast or West. These results uncover “varieties of decarceration” across the states and suggest that recent reform efforts—although effective—can only account for a portion of the observed decreases in state prison populations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Racial Resentment and the Death Penalty

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-07

  articleOpen access

  We explore the annual number of death sentences imposed on black and white offenders within each US state from 1989 through 2017, with particular attention to the impact of aggregate levels of racial resentment. Controlling for general ideological conservatism, homicides, population size, violent crime, institutional and partisan factors, and the inertial nature of death sentencing behavior, we find that racial hostility translates directly into more death sentences, particularly for black offenders. Racial resentment itself reflects each state’s history of racial strife; we show powerful indirect effects of a history of lynching and of racial population shares. These effects are mediated through contemporaneous levels of racial resentment. Our findings raise serious questions about the appropriateness of the ultimate punishment, as they show its deep historical and contemporary connection to white racial hostility toward blacks.

  PublisherDOI

• Black in blue networks: social network integration and racial disparities in police use of force

  Social Forces · 2025-09-06 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Explanations for police behavior argue that “us versus them” group dynamics shape officer interactions with the public. Yet, studies on racial disparities in policing overlook the interpersonal networks central to scholarship on group boundaries. We integrate insights from the literature on networks, group identity, and intergroup relations to consider how social network size and racial composition affect racial disparities in police officer use of force, and how those social network effects are conditioned by officer race. We test our perspective by analyzing newly collected longitudinal network data on the friendship relations between officers in one large department and linking these data to administrative records on officer use of force. The number of friendship ties to other officers is associated with within-officer increases in use of excessive force against Black victims, but not against White victims. Ties to White officers are only associated with use of excessive force against Black victims and only among Black officers. These findings suggest that social network integration contributes to racial disparities in police use of force and carries broader implications for intra- and intergroup discrimination in organizations characterized by strong institutional attachments.

  PublisherDOI

• “The Ties that Bind are those that Punish: Network Polarization and Federal Crime Policy Gridlock, 1979–2005”

  Social Forces · 2024-04-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Largely overlooked in research on criminal legal expansion is the rise of political polarization and its attendant consequences for crime policy. Drawing on theories of intergroup collaboration and policymaking research, I argue that network polarization—low frequencies of collaborative relations between lawmakers belonging to distinct political groups—negatively affects crime legislation passage by reducing information flows, increasing intergroup hostility, and creating opportunities for political attacks. To evaluate this perspective, I recreate dynamic legislative networks between 1979 and 2005 using data on 1,897,019 cosponsorship relationships between 1537 federal lawmakers and the outcomes of 5950 federal crime bills. Results illustrate that increases in partisan network segregation and the number of densely clustered subgroups both have negative effects on bill passage. These relationships are not moderated by majority party status and peak during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when prison growth showed its first signs of slowing. These findings provide new insight to the relationship between polarization and policy and suggest that increases in network polarization may be partly responsible for declines in crime policy adoption observed in recent decades.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Denise L. Haynie

  Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

  9 shared

• Christian Caron

  1 shared

• Nafeesa Andrabi

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared

• Sadé L. Lindsay

  Cornell University

  1 shared

• Frank R. Baumgartner

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared

• Laura C. Frizzell

  The Ohio State University

  1 shared

• Eric Schwoon

  The Ohio State University

  1 shared

• Jenna Wertsching

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared