A recent study led by Associate Professor of Sociology Rena Zito, along with Stacy De Coster from North Carolina State University and Eden Ralph ’23, sheds light on how college students feel about admitting applicants with felony records and histories of incarceration. The article, titled “,” was published in “Sociological Focus.”

Using a survey-based experiment, the study examines how factors like race and the type of offense affect college students’ willingness to accept or reject applicants with criminal backgrounds. The research involved students from two universities (one public and one private) who were asked to respond to a vignette about a fictional college applicant with a felony record.

The findings reveal some important patterns:

• �þ��� are more likely to support restrictive admissions policies for applicants with violent criminal records than for those with drug-related offenses, regardless of the applicant’s race.
• Political views, concerns about campus safety, and general skepticism about the justice system played a major role in shaping students’ opinions.
• Qualitative responses (open-ended answers) showed that students often wrestle with a tension between supporting second chances and prioritizing safety and fairness in admissions.
• Race shapes deliberations of admissions for applicants with drug records but not for those with violent records.

Overall, student support for the restrictive inclusion of students with violent and drug felony records mirrors broader public opinion on criminal justice policy reform, potentially hindering the full restoration of rights and opportunities, particularly among those deemed unworthy.

Eden Ralph ’23, who contributed to the research, went on to earn an M.S. in Criminology in2024 and is now working toward a Ph.D in Criminology, both at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rena Zito, associate professor of sociology at �þ���, presented on the effects of offense type and applicant race on college students’ attitudes towards college applicants with felony records. Zito co-authored the research with Stacy De Coster, professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.

Zito’s presentation focused on respondents’ qualitative responses to open-ended questions about why universities should or should not restrict access to applicants with felony histories. While the quantitative results from the survey-based experiment indicated that offense type, but not applicant race, influenced attitudes towards the social exclusion of applicants with criminal records, the qualitative results evidenced nuanced racialized language in how respondents responded to the applicants. For example, respondents were more likely to emphasize academic merit and a holistic approach for white applicants than Black applicants. In addition, they cite possible harm to the reputation of the university when considering Black applicants with violent records, but not when considering a white applicant with the same record. The presentation was part of a session titled “Recidivism and Barriers to Reentry” for which Zito was the presider.

Associate Professor of Sociology Raj Ghoshal organized and presided over two sessions on Racial Conceptualization and Racial Attitudes. He also presented research that addresses how much importance Americans give to self-identification when thinking about what race other people “really” are.

Ghoshal argued that theories of colorblind racism imply that white Americans would be especially likely, and Black Americans especially unlikely, to think that race is “up to each person,” while theories of old-fashioned racism imply the opposite. Ghoshal tested these theories using an original nationally representative survey of over 1,000 Americans and found that neither holds. Instead, results showed that multiracial people, racially ambiguous people, Hispanic Americans, and “contested whites” are more supportive of racial voluntarism than either white-only or Black-only Americans. He argued that findings support theories rooted in identity threat and contestation and call into question some popular claims about people of color’s views of racial identity.

D’Andrea is a psychology and English double major with a minor in criminal justice studies and is a sociology major with a double minor in criminal justice studies and human service studies.

The Outstanding Student in Criminal Justice Studies Award recognizes senior students minoring in criminal justice studies who have shown outstanding academic achievement within the minor and/or service to the field of criminal justice studies through internships, independent study, research or participation in criminal justice studies organizations.

Both D’Andrea and Skelley have records of exceptional academic achievement and contributions to Criminal Justice Studies. Program faculty were enthusiastic about the quality of D’Andrea’s writing, her pursuit of an original independent study within the minor, and the creative ways she has made connections between her English major and her interest in the study of crime. Faculty were impressed by Skelley’s research on attitudes towards police reform, which she has presented at the Southern Sociological Society conference in Myrtle Beach, S.C., as well as her work with Family Abuse Services of Alamance County.

Jessica Skelley ’23 presented a study titled “Predicting Attitudes towards the Defund The Police Movement vs. Police Budget Reallocation Reform: An Exploratory Study” at the Southern Sociological Society annual meeting in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on March 30. This research was mentored by Rena Zito, Associate Professor of Sociology.

Skelley, an Elon College Fellow and sociology major, collected nationally representative survey data to explore the individual-level predictors of attitudes towards the language of #DefundThePolice and the police budget reallocation reforms it embodies.

Results from OLS regression models provided support for Skelley’s hypotheses. Specifically, she found (1) significantly more support for police budget reallocation than the DTP movement, (2) there is a large Black-White racial gap in attitudes towards the DTP movement but not towards police budget reallocation, (3) there are strong connections between perceptions of law enforcement and support for the DTP movement and budget reallocation reforms, and (4) the impact of perceptions of police on support for budget reallocation is conditioned by one’s level of concern about crime. Her study provides insight into the ongoing police legitimacy crisis, and it suggests that accomplishing meaningful reform will require a shift in messaging rather than a shift in attitudes.

Skelley will be attending the University of St.Thomas School of Law starting in fall 2023.

Rena Zito, associate professor of sociology at �þ���, presented the results of a survey-based experiment examining the impact of offense type and applicant race on university students’ attitudes towards university applicants with felony records. Zito co-authored the research with Stacy De Coster, professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.

The study demonstrates how offense characteristics and respondent political attitudes, concerns about campus crime, and legal cynicism shape perceptions of applicants with criminal records as threats to be managed or restricted. The research builds on an emerging body of experimental research on the barriers to upward social mobility through education for groups already experiencing extreme marginalization. The presentation was part of a session titled “Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? Racial Attitudes towards Crime & Punishment,” for which Zito was the presider.

Associate Professor of Sociology Raj Ghoshal organized and presided for a panel on Racial Conceptualization. He also presented in this panel. Since “race” has no fixed essence, racial conceptualization is the study of what people believe race consists of and how they think about its meanings. Ghoshal’s talk presented findings from a survey of American adults.

His analysis showed that most Americans think of race not just in terms of categories (White, Black, Asian, etc.) but also often conceptualize race as a set of spectrums, wherein people are thought of as belonging to categories to varying degrees. He also found that respondents’ age, gender, race and political ideology influence how much they think of race as a series of spectrums rather than solely as binary in/out categories. He argued that recognizing that people use multiple lenses to conceptualize race can improve anti-discrimination efforts.

Associate Professor of Sociology Alexis Franzese and research mentee Brad Weiss ’23 presented their research, “Assessing a Theoretical Model about Motivations for Change within College Student Memoirs,” which investigated the applications of a sociological theory about how people make the decision for self-change through content analysis of several memoirs of college students about their transitions to campus life. The model studied put forth by Kiecolt (1994), suggests that decision for change occurs through four stages; the impetus to change, conditioning factors, a critical event, and finally appraisal. Preliminary results indicate support for Kiecolt’s model, and suggest the great degree to which the environment that one chooses can support (or inhibit) the transformation one may undergo. Their work provides important insights into understanding processes of self-change and of the college experience specifically.

The Criminal Justice Studies Award recognizes a senior student minoring in criminal justice studies who has shown outstanding academic achievement within the minor and/or service to the field of criminal justice studies through internships, independent study, research or participation in criminal justice studies organizations.

Mahoney has a record of exceptional academic achievement inside and outside of the CJS program. Their criminal justice studies professors were unanimous that Mahoney is a model for other CJS students in both their contributions to heated discussions of criminal justice issues and their writing about crime data and policy issues.

Mahoney will begin working on their doctoral degree in psychology at Stevenson University in the fall, with the goal of becoming a clinical and forensic psychologist. They plan to specialize in working with LGBTQ+ adolescents and persons with gender dysphoria.

The research project, mentored by Professor of Psychology and Director of Undergraduate Research Meredith Allison, used an online experimental vignette design to examine alibi believability. Specifically, they examined the impacts of exculpatory evidence, inculpatory evidence and judges’ instructions on alibi evidence on respondents’ evaluations of believability.

The researchers found that exculpatory evidence in the absence of prosecutors’ physical evidence increased alibi believability. Moreover, judges’ instructions had no effect on respondents’ evaluations of believability, consistent with prior studies that show that jurors largely ignore judges’ instructions.

“For Wyatt Outlaw: A Film and Panel Discussion on Lynching in the US” told the stories of the three known lynchings in Alamance County dating back to 1870, local efforts to find and preserve the stories of those victims, and how the community can progress in the face of continued racial oppression. The discussion sprang from a viewing of “An Outrage,” a short film documenting the stories of six lynchings across America and the repercussions on the victims’ descendants and communities. The panel closed with a session for healing and reflection led by faculty and staff.

�þ��� has a responsibility to advance conversation, academic study, and progress “as a center for truth-telling,” said Tyrone Jean, assistant dean of students and director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity Education.

“Elon in particular has the opportunity to provide tools for students to advance their awareness of racial inequities, but also for building their sense of self,” Jean said. “We have to prepare students to have knowledge and use analysis so they can do things to make the world a more equitable place.”

Discussion began with unsparing accounts of local lynchings.

“These are stories of terror and the experience of terrorism. These are stories that are ongoing,” said Buffie Longmire-Avital, associate professor of psychology and coordinator of the African and African-American Studies program. “We must not forget the lasting impact anti-Black terror has had on all persons of the Black community, not just on the families of victims and in the communities where they occurred.”

Charles Irons, professor of history and chair of the History and Geography Department, detailed the victims’ stories. Two of the lynchings have connections to Elon, thoroughly detailed in the Committee on History and Memory’s Fall 2020 report, which Irons led.

• Wyatt Outlaw was the first Black person elected as town commissioner and constable of nearby Graham, N.C., and a statewide symbol of biracial democracy. He “was an extraordinary leader and as prominent as any Alamance County produced,” Irons said, with ties to �þ��� through his white slave-owner father, Chelsey Faucette, a trustee of Elon forebear The Graham Institute. After fighting off a Ku Klux Klan and Constitutional Union Guard raid in 1869, Outlaw was dragged from his home on Feb. 26, 1870, and hung from a tree near the Graham courthouse. J.A. Long — brother of Elon’s first president, William S. Long — founded Alamance County’s Constitutional Union Guard, a branch of the KKK.
• William Puryear was lynched shortly after Outlaw because he claimed to be able to identify members of the masked party involved in that murder. He was dragged from his home, killed, and his body left in a mill pond where his remains were found three months later. His wife was only able to identify him by his clothing.
• John Jeffress was killed by a mob in 1920 after being accused of a sexual assault. Elon’s fourth president, William Harper, led the posse that arrested Jeffress and worked with a judge to arrange a same-day capital trial. A second mob of armed white men seized Jeffress from custody and murdered him.

“We know that these murders are just the tip of the iceberg,” Irons said. “Racial violence goes deeper and broader (than lynchings and murders). The stories of violence against Blacks are many in Alamance County.”

LaShauna Austria, a member of Alamance County’s Community Remembrance Coalition, described stories of brutality and violence against members of her family and the Black community in Alamance County as recently as a 2019 incident involving Burlington police.

“When we think about the Alamance Remembrance Coalition, we want to speak to these three individuals but also be aware that there’s still a lot of terrorism and violence happening to Black bodies right here in our community,” Austria said.

The coalition is working with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, to memorialize Alamance County’s lynchings in its national museum and monument, said fellow coalition member Loy Campbell.

Elon Law School Assistant Professor Amanda Elyse outlined numerous ways America’s criminal justice system disenfranchises and discriminates against Black citizens. Black Americans’ freedoms of speech and assembly are often curtailed and met with police resistance, their neighborhoods are policed more heavily, and they are more often subject to illegal searches and seizures, Elyse said. Juries are more likely to be biased against Black defendants, leading to higher rates of incarceration.

“You hear people call it a broken system,” Elyse said, “but that’s just the system established by white men in support of white supremacy working as it was intended to. Change is going to have to be radical.”

To spur those changes, Jean said the campus community needs to focus on “transforming higher education policies to redistribute power, wealth, access and address historical wrongs.”

“To our Black students, I would say: Be steadfast, be hopeful, be in community, and be unapologetic in wanting to dismantle racist institutions,” Jean said.

Cherrel Miller Dyce, associate professor of education and director of intercultural education, and John Robinson-Miller IV, CREDE assistant director, led a session afterward for students about the discussion.

The panel was part of CREDE’s Black History Month calendar of events. It was sponsored by numerous centers, departments and programs including: African and African-American Studies, Poverty and Social Justice Studies, the Department of History and Geography, CREDE, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, American Studies, the Truitt Center, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Criminal Justice Studies.

This year’s award goes to Jacob Hayward and Sarah Boggins, two members of the Class of 2020 who have exemplified the spirit of the award through their academic excellence, research contributions to the study of crime and criminal justice, and undertaking of independent study.

Jacob Hayward is majoring in policy studies and sociology with a minor in criminal justice studies. He is an Elon College Fellow whose independent research has addressed many issues in the function and study of criminal justice. His Fellows research was titled “The Effect of Partisanship on State Correctional Healthcare Spending.” In addition, he conducted original research on criminal justice studies students’ attitudes in his research titled “Shaping Sympathy? Courses on Crime and Student Attitudes towards Prisoners.” Hayward will attend the Northeastern University School of Law in the fall and after law school he hopes to work in prisoner right’s litigation.

Sarah Boggins is majoring in mathematics with minors in criminal justice studies and peace and conflict studies. She will be commissioning the U.S. Air Force as a second lieutenant upon her graduation. While at Elon, Boggins has excelled academically and completed independent study on criminal justice topics that will prepare her for her military career. She will be acting as a Gold Bar Recruiter for her first year on active duty, after which she will be sent to her next duty location to begin working as a Force Support officer.

Reflecting on her time at Elon, Boggins reports:

“My time at Elon has provided me with an array of experiences, ranging from an independent study with Dr. Duane McClearn regarding espionage and counterintelligence; research with Dr. Justin Clar in the chemistry department; numerous enriching leadership experiences in AFROTC; recruiting students for the Peace & Conflict Studies minor in my role as a student representative; and interacting with Elon’s students as a Resident Assistant. These are just a few of the enlightening academic and leadership opportunities I’ve had while at Elon. I am so grateful for the guidance and knowledge I’ve received from my professors and mentors — without them, I would not be the individual I am today.”

Criminal Justice Studies minor Nicole Sumberac ’20 worked at Talkin, Muccigrosso, & Roberts, LLP, a criminal defense attorney’s office in New York City. Her internship was advised by Rena Zito, assistant professor in sociology and coordinator of the CJS program.

About her experience, Sumberac says:

“My criminal justice courses sparked my interest in learning about the criminal justice system. During my summer internship at Talkin, Muccigrosso, & Roberts, LLP in New York City, I observed the work of a criminal defense attorney firsthand. I aided in case preparation, observed interviews, and obtained relevant documents. Being exposed to a multitude of court agencies, I was able to learn the true nature of many jobs within the court system.

“The most valuable aspect of my internship was my attendance at various court proceedings, in almost every court in the New York metropolitan area at both the state and federal level, and meetings in jail. Listening to the viewpoints of the parties involved in various cases, from the lawyers, to the defendants, the victims, and the judges, made me appreciate the complexity of the system. The system moves slowly as everyone is trying to ensure that it is a fair process for the people involved.

“This internship gave me an understanding of New York’s court systems that I would never have acquired by merely reading about them. This internship provided me with the experiences necessary to assess the various paths I have the option of pursuing post-graduation.”

Are you a criminal justice studies minor hoping to pursue an internship in a related field? Contact Robin Karmarek, director of internships at rkazmarek@elon.edu or (336) 278-6541.

Are you a criminal justice studies minor who would like to have your recent or ongoing criminal justice studies-related internship highlighted in this feature? Contact Rena Zito, coordinator of the Criminal Justice Studies program, at rzito@elon.edu.