Is it just teen spirit? In this episode we speak with Professor Bianca Bersani about her work on life-course criminology, specifically the impacts of arrests on adolescents and their transition into adulthood.
Bianca is currently an associate professor in criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland and director of the Maryland Crime Research and Innovation Center. She earned her BA and MA in sociology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her PhD in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland. Bianca’s research interests are broadly shaped by the life course perspective. Specifically, her work centers on examining patterns (e.g., trajectories) and processes related to offending across the life course with particular emphasis on how and why salient life events like marriage and arrest alter criminal offending trajectories and influence desistance from crime, the mechanisms that help to facilitate behavioral change over time, and how processes of change may be conditioned by one’s social position (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender, class, and immigrant generation) or socio-historical context. Another line of work focuses on examining and explaining the generational disparity in immigrant offending.
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Episode Transcriptions Available Below for Download: Word (.docx) and PDF (.pdf)
Get in touch with Bianca:
University of Maryland website // bbersani AT umd.edu // Twitter
This is the article authored by Bianca and her colleagues that was discussed in this episode of The Crim Academy:
Bersani, Bianca, Wade Jacobesen, and Elaine Doherty. (2022). Does early adolescent arrest alter the developmental course of offending into young adulthood. Journal of Youth and Adolescence. [Article link]