From climate change to international relations to racial disparities in health care, researchers in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences are exploring and addressing the most important and challenging issues of our times. 

BSOS is one of the largest colleges at the University of Maryland, and has nearly 85,000 living undergraduate and graduate alumni working in countless fields across the globe. At the heart of our college’s operations and impact are its academic and research pursuits.

In classrooms and research sites/labs, BSOS students learn from and conduct groundbreaking research alongside our world-renowned faculty, who are committed to teaching and to making valuable contributions to their disciplines. 

Interdisciplinary efforts are a hallmark of research activity in BSOS—both within the college’s numerous departments and centers, and across other colleges and units on campus. Beyond the College Park campus, we partner with state, federal, private and international entities. These collaborations are critical, as the grand challenges facing our nation and our world must be tackled from every angle. 

BSOS Research Hubs
 

September 2018

The University of Maryland (UMD) has received a $500,000 grant from the Maryland Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention (GOCCP) to support the development of a new Maryland Crime Research and Innovation Center. UMD will lead the effort and will partner with University System of Maryland (USM) institutions to engage interdisciplinary capabilities, in coordination with resources offered by industry and state partners, to support the establishment of a knowledge and research center to help the state’s crime control and prevention efforts. The initiative will benefit from the state’s collective talent and expertise to conduct interdisciplinary research and to help inform state policies and programs.

Through these collaborative efforts, the Center will:

• Work to identify threats, develop innovative, outcome-based solutions aimed at combatting violent crime, and evaluate progress;
• Examine criminal justice issues related to human trafficking, firearms trafficking, drug trafficking, as well as gangs;
• Bring together resources, research experts, thought leaders, and industry innovations to tackle the complex social issues that underlie violent crime in Maryland;
• Conduct research to inform pilot tests of promising crime prevention interventions, with the ultimate goal of informing statewide policy; and
• Employ data and analysis of data to develop law enforcement solutions, victim services, prevention efforts, and criminal justice programs that reduce violent crime and improve quality of life for Maryland residents.

"We are excited to contribute our collective research expertise to support this initiative, which we believe will help positively impact safety, security, and quality of life for Maryland residents," said UMD Senior Vice President and Provost Mary Ann Rankin. 

The year-long initiative will be led by the School of Public Policy’s Dawn Pulliam, project director and principal investigator, and William Lucyshyn, co-principal investigator, in partnership with faculty experts from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, the Robert H. Smith School of Business, the School of Public Health, the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, and the College of Information Studies, as well as a liaison from the GOCCP.

“The safety and security of the citizens of Maryland requires a team approach,” said V. Glenn Fueston, Jr., Executive Director of GOCCP. “Everything we do must be centered around identifying the roots of violent crime and finding solutions that focus on prevention, enforcement, and victims services. We look forward to engaging the academic expertise across Maryland’s university system, while partnering with stakeholders, to ensure that we have the benefit of the best talent across the state working together to make Maryland the best state in which to live, work and raise a family.”

About the University of Maryland

The University of Maryland, College Park is the state's flagship university and one of the nation's preeminent public research universities. A global leader in research, entrepreneurship and innovation, the university is home to more than 38,000 students, 9,000 faculty and staff, and 250 academic programs. Its faculty includes two Nobel laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners, 60 members of the national academies and scores of Fulbright scholars. The University of Maryland Safe Center for Human Trafficking Survivors, a joint MPowering the State initiative between the University of Maryland, College Park, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, helps prevent human trafficking and serves survivors through research and policy advocacy. UMD’s Department of Criminology, ranked No. 1 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report. For more information about the University of Maryland, College Park, visit www.umd.edu.

About the Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention

The Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention serves as a coordinating office that advises the Governor on criminal justice strategies. The office plans, promotes, and funds efforts with government entities, private organizations, and the community to advance public policy, enhance public safety, reduce crime and juvenile delinquency, and serve victims. For more information about GOCCP, visit goccp.maryland.gov.

Kunpeng Zhang, Assistant Professor
Robert H. Smith School of Business

This project seeks to reduce or prevent violent crimes by using large-scale data collection from Twitter and a methodology called Recurrent Cascades Convolutional Networks (CasCN) to monitor, predict, and visualize violent cascades in a given area. Using user-generated data from Twitter, this research could help proactively offer information for law enforcement policies regarding violence.

The research implements real-time social media monitoring to dynamically predict the cascade size of a certain violent topic at a specific geographical area (e.g., if a robbery happened in College Park today, how many residents in this area will pay attention to it for the next three days?), in addition to standard reporting. The research leverages long short-term memory (LSTM) and graph convolutional network (GCN) to predict the future size of a given cascade.

Deep learning is a machine learning technique that teaches computers to do what comes naturally to humans: learn by example. Deep learning is used in technologies such as autonomous cars and voice-controlled devices. Using a deep-learning framework, the researcher is modeling the structural and temporal characteristics of violence, as well as the features. The algorithm is being implemented and evaluated using Python and Pytorch.

Next steps include using existing data to test and validate the model, further validation using social media data, and creating a visualization of the results.

Stephanie Weaver, Jeff Horwitz, and Charles Harry, Associate Research Professor
School of Public Policy

The opioid epidemic costs the U.S. over a hundred lives every day and hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The mission of Stop the Addiction Fatality Epidemic (SAFE) is to contribute in a tangible way to overcoming the addiction epidemic in the U.S. The treatment locator application helps individuals find treatment centers that match their needs quickly and independently.

Other treatment locators only identify facilities which are located the closest to the individual, not taking into account needs characteristics. SAFE identifies the facility best suited to a treatment-seeker’s specific needs as well as their proximity to the facility. The SAFE Treatment Locator draws on individual parameters from a potential patient while protecting their privacy.

SAFE completed the database integration and application programming interface. After final beta testing was completed, SAFE publicly launched the treatment locator at www.SAFEProject.us. The marketing strategy targets Maryland and, particularly, Arundel County through social media. SAFE is collecting usage data and feedback from users, which will be used to determine improvements to the application.

SAFE plans to include more information and resources related to payment (e.g., insurance information) in order to assist individuals in determining how they can pay for treatment. Additionally, future versions of the locator will include analytical data that could assist policymakers in assessing and determining growing treatment facility needs. Lastly, some cosmetic changes will be made to accommodate requests from users.

Kevin Roy, Ph.D., Associate Professor & Craig Fryer, Ph.D., Associate Professor
School of Public Health

This evidence-based pilot project works closely with formerly incarcerated Black men who are at-risk for continued gun and community violence, as well as drug trafficking, upon reentry back into their families and communities. The research investigates how prior experiences of trauma and violence, as well as incarceration-related trauma, shape the reentry and reintegration pathways of Black men and their families. Using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, the research works closely with Black men to investigate their experiences and their strengths-based strategies to counter trauma and violence as they transition — often repeatedly — between correctional facilities and their home communities.

The researchers are conducting life history interviews with 20 Black men in both a social setting and during incarceration to identify traumatic life experiences that have led to depression, other mental and physical health issues, and incarceration and effects of definitions of masculinity on health. A focus group (8 men each) and individual life history interviews are being conducted at a correctional facility and at a barbershop in Prince George’s County. The research seeks to identify how experiences of trauma and violence (including incarceration-related trauma) shape the reentry and reintegration pathways of Black men and their families.

The focus group protocol is a more general discussion-based guide, with a discussion of what men know about trauma (with a focus on violence), how they define it, and what its effects are for men’s health. The individual interview protocol to discuss exposure to violence and traumatic events, including incarceration. Men will also discuss strategies that they have developed to cope with trauma and identify barriers that continue to affect their daily routines in employment, health, and family life.

Jinney Smith, Ph.D., Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Kiminori Nakumura, Ph.D., Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice

This research examines the risk of violent recidivism, focusing on offenders of drug offenses (particularly drug trafficking) in Maryland Circuit Courts. Using three different data sources, researchers profile drug traffickers’ juvenile and criminal history and predict their risk of violent recidivism by incorporating predictors such as age at first arrest/conviction, prior violent and weapon charges, and other variables. This research also hopes to display patterns of offending and criminal history that leads to current drug offense sentences and asks whether sentences for drug traffickers are proportional to the violent recidivism risk they pose and whether or not they are effective in preventing violent recidivism.

Recent criminal justice reform efforts characterize drug offenders as non-violence offenders who warrant reduced sentences but relying on the instant offense to determine which offenders are a low public safety risk could be misleading. Though drug dealers and traffickers are targeted for punitive sanctions (i.e. mandatory minimums and sentence enhancements), little is known empirically about their future propensity for violence.

Individual sentencing data from the State Commission on Criminal Sentencing (MSCCSP), Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS), Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) and the Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) are merged to identify patterns of criminal history among drug offenders and drug traffickers. To date, researchers have identified factors which may help differentiate subsets of drug offenders with a particularly heightened risk of violent recidivism, including violent crime, and are completing the data cleaning and merging. Once the final dataset is completed, the researchers will examine descriptive statistics and use a regression model to assess drug offenders and their criminal histories.

Laura Ardito, Deputy Director, SAFE Center & Brian Kim, Assistant Research Professor
SAFE Center for Human Trafficking Survivors and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences

The University of Maryland SAFE Center for Human Trafficking Survivors is testing the feasibility of Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) to estimate the prevalence and nature of human trafficking in Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties in Maryland.

Using respondent driven sampling (RDS), a network-based survey approach, researchers hope to address: 1) whether RDS is appropriate for estimating the prevalence and nature of sex trafficking in Prince George’s County and Montgomery County, and 2) the nature and scope of human trafficking in the defined geographic regions, including victims’ reported victimization experiences and service needs.

The researchers have designed a survey that the participants will complete, and will analyze the results as part of this study.

At the end of the project, the researchers anticipate that they will have a tool ready to implement.

The results from this project will inform future RDS studies as well as potential new services and interventions for victims. Ultimately, this project hopes to produce quantitative and qualitative data statewide to inform policy, resource allocation and funding decisions for human trafficking projects/programs.

March 2019

The Maryland Crime Research and Innovation Center (MCRIC) has announced five pilot research projects that will advance the Center’s interdisciplinary research agenda in its first year.

MCRIC, supported by a grant from the Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention (GOCCP), provides academic research expertise to advance evidence-based policies and practices to help the state’s crime control and prevention efforts. The initiative benefits from Maryland’s collective talent and expertise to conduct interdisciplinary research and to help inform state policies and programs.

The pilot projects are:

• Using RDS to Identify Human Trafficking Victims in Prince George’s County and Montgomery County
  • Laura Ardito, Deputy Director, SAFE Center & Brian Kim, Assistant Research Professor, SAFE Center for Human Trafficking Survivors and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences
• Drug Traffickers in the Maryland Circuit Court: Their Past, Their Sentences, and Prediction and Prevention of Future Violence
  • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Jinney Smith, Ph.D., & Kiminori Nakumura, Ph.D., Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Trauma, Incarceration, and Black Men’s Health in Maryland
  • ​​​​​​​Kevin Roy, Ph.D., Associate Professor & Craig Fryer, Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of Public Health
• Stop the Addiction Fatality Epidemic (SAFE) Project Treatment Locator Application
  • ​​​​​​​Stephanie Weaver, Jeff Horwitz, and Charles Harry, Associate Research Professor, School of Public Policy
• Violence Diffusion Prediction via Deep Learning
  • ​​​​​​​Kunpeng Zhang, Assistant Professor, Robert H. Smith School of Business

For more information about the research projects, contact us at mcric@umd.edu.

April 2019

The Maryland Crime Research and Innovation Center (MCRIC) has announced the appointment of Dr. Gary LaFree as its new Director.

The University of Maryland launched MCRIC in 2018 with support from the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services in order to harness the power of research, data, and science to reduce crime and improve lives across Maryland. The Center provides academic expertise, conducts research, integrates data, and develops and evaluates research-based, innovative criminal justice strategies aimed at preventing and reducing crime.

Dr. Gary LaFree is Professor and Chair of the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department at the University of Maryland. He is also the former Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland.

The START Center is a Department of Homeland Security Emeritus Center of Excellence headquartered at the University of Maryland. START supports the research efforts of leading social scientists at more than 50 academic and research institutions, each of whom is conducting original investigations into fundamental questions about terrorism. During his time as Director of START, the Center launched the development of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), an open-source database that includes information on terrorist attacks around the world since 1970, more than 180,000 cases in all.

Dr. LaFree received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Indiana University in 1979. During 2005-2006, he served as President of the American Society of Criminology (ASC). Dr. LaFree was named a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology in 2006 and a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Law and Justice in 2008. He has also served as the Past President of the ASC’s Division on International Criminology (1991-1993), the chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Crime, Law and Deviance (1991-1993), the Executive Board of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (2001-2006), and the Executive Committee of the Justice Research Statistics Association (2000-2001, 1993-1994).

While at the University of Maryland, Dr. LaFree has been a founding member of the Democracy Collaborative and an invited member of the National Consortium of Violence Research. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, Dr. LaFree served as the Chair of the Sociology and Criminology Department at the University of New Mexico for six years and as the Director of the New Mexico Criminal Justice Statistics Analysis Center for 13 years. Dr. LaFree was appointed by the Governor of New Mexico to chair the State Crime and Juvenile Justice Coordinating Council—a position that he filled for four years.

Dr. LaFree received the G. Paul Sylvestre Award for outstanding achievements in advancing criminal justice statistics in 1994, and the Phillip Hoke Award for excellence in applied research in 1994 and 1998, from the Justice Research Statistics Association. LaFree has written more than 60 articles and book chapters and three books and is currently on the editorial boards of seven journals.

Dr. LaFree will work closely with the Governor's Office and MCRIC researchers to advance the Center’s mission to provide academic expertise, conduct research, integrate data, and develop and evaluate research-based, innovative criminal justice strategies aimed at preventing and reducing crime in Maryland.