Andrea.Leverentz - UMass Boston

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Andrea.Leverentz

Areas of Expertise

Urban and community sociology, communities and crime, impact of incarceration on individuals and communities, gender, qualitative research methods

Degrees

PhD, University of Chicago

Professional Publications & Contributions

BOOKS
Leverentz, Andrea. 2022. Intersecting Lives: How Place Shapes Reentry. University of California Press.
Leverentz, Andrea, Elsa Chen, and Johnna Christian (eds). 2020. Beyond Recidivism: New Approaches to Research on Prisoner Reentry and Reintegration. New York University Press.
Leverentz, Andrea. (2014). The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma: How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance. Rutgers University Press.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Leverentz, Andrea. 2020. “Beyond neighborhoods: Activity spaces of returning prisoners.” Social Problems, 67(1), 150-170.
Leverentz, Andrea, Adam Pittman, and Jennifer Skinnon. 2018. “Place and perception: Constructions of community and safety across neighborhoods and residents.” City and Community, 17(4): 972-995.
Leverentz, Andrea. 2018. “Churning through the system: How people engage with the criminal justice system when faced with short sentences.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Special Issue: After Imprisonment 77. Pp. 123-143.
Leverentz, Andrea and Monica Williams. (2017). “Contextualizing Community Crime Control: Race, geography, and configurations of control in four communities” Criminology, 55 (1): 112- 136.
Leverentz, Andrea. (2014). “New Parochialism and community dynamics: Benefits and possible collateral consequences." Criminology and Public Policy, 13(2): 217-224.
Martinez, Damian J. and Andrea Leverentz. (2014). "In It for the Long Haul: Exploring Gender Dynamics in Former Prisoner-Family Relationships.” Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology, 2(1): 68-94.
Leverentz, Andrea. (2012). “Narratives of crime and criminals: How places socially construct the crime problem.” Sociological Forum, 27(2): 348-371

Additional Information

View Professor Leverentz's Curriculum Vitae

Current Research

Andrea Leverentz’s research centers on the impact of crime and incarceration on individuals and communities. Her book, The Ex-Prisoner’s Dilemma: How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance (Rutgers University Press 2014) looks at how women talk about and manage competing messages about what it means to return to their communities post-incarceration, and how their experiences are shaped by their roles as women, Black women, mothers, daughters, sisters, romantic partners, and employees. Currently, she is analyzing interview and observational data from an NSF-funded project on the neighborhood context of prisoner reentry, both from the perspective of men and women returning from prison and from residents of receiving communities. Together, these data provide valuable information to better understand the impact of community context and residential change on desistance, how communities view and respond to returning prisoners, and how people who have been incarcerated understand and experience their neighborhood context. In addition, she is analyzing how these experiences are raced and gendered.