Lauren Krivo is Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University and a faculty affiliate of the Criminal Justice Program.  Her research seeks to understand the interconnections among societal racialized structures and inequality in social outcomes across racial and ethnic groups in the United States.  Her recent book with Ruth D. Peterson, Divergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial-Spatial Divide (Russell Sage 2010) shows that inequalities in crime across neighborhoods of distinct colors are rooted in the extraordinary differentials in community conditions that are core components of the segregated structure of U.S. urban areas.  She has published widely on the role of segregation in city and neighborhood crime as well as contributing to broader academic dialogue on race, ethnicity, crime, and justice through her co-edited volumes:  The Many Colors of Crime:  Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America (with Ruth D. Peterson and John Hagan, NYU Press 2006) and “Race, Crime, and Justice: Contexts and Complexities”  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2009 (with Ruth D. Peterson).

In her current research, she continues to examine the macro-structural underpinnings of neighborhood crime including analyses of the role of labor market conditions, neighborhood investment patterns, and local spatial inequality.  She is also involved in a collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse examining how criminal and other problem behaviors are affected by the different neighborhood environments that people move through during the course of their daily lives.

Krivo is the co-organizer of the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network (RDCJN) with Ruth D. Peterson.  The RDCJN is a national network of scholars that seeks to broaden scholarship at the intersection of race, crime, and justice, and promote the success of junior scholars of color through its Summer Research Institute.