Is the criminal justice system truly just? In this episode we speak with Professor Marisa Omori about her work on racial and ethnic disparities within the court system (and criminal justice system more broadly).
Marisa is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in Criminology, Law & Society. Her research focuses on racial inequality in the criminal legal system, courts and sentencing, and punishment and social control. Specifically, she investigates questions of how racial inequality is created and maintained within the criminal legal system through ostensibly race-neutral practices, and how context matters for this inequality. Her work includes projects examining racial inequalities in Miami-Dade’s criminal justice system at the individual and neighborhood levels, as well as how place and local practices matter for institutionalizing racial inequalities in prosecution and sentencing in the state and federal systems.
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Episode Transcriptions Available Below for Download: Word (.docx) and PDF (.pdf)
Get in touch with Marisa:
University of Missouri-St. Louis Website // marisa.omori AT umsl.edu
This is the article authored by Marisa and her colleague that was discussed in this episode of The Crim Academy:
Omori, M., & Petersen, N. (2020). Institutionalizing inequality in the courts: Decomposing racial and ethnic disparities in detention, conviction, and sentencing. Criminology, 58(4), 678-713. [Article link]