My name is Michael Zanger-Tishler, and I am a PhD candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard. My work is comprised of several related strands. First, I use quantitative methods to study inequalities in the criminal legal system. These projects are primarily coauthored, interdisciplinary collaborations that involve economists, sociologists, criminologists, political scientists, and applied mathematicians. Currently, this work largely focuses on the American criminal legal system; a list of these projects can be found on my research page.

 

My second area of research, which is the subject of my dissertation, was inspired by my empirical research on the criminal legal system and my desire to probe the limitations of quantitative methods. In this research, I ask: why do different countries produce and differentially make available data on crime and the criminal legal system? And, how does varying data access and production shape research and knowledge of crime and the criminal legal system in these different countries? Based on interviews with government employees, journalists, academics, and non-profit researchers in three countries, as well as secondary research on trends in data set usage in research and journalism, I study how different data environments across countries differentially shape knowledge of crime and the criminal justice system.

 

Finally, I have also applied my interest in theorizing data and empirically studying inequalities in the criminal legal system to the study of risk assessment instruments (RAIs) used in the criminal legal system. In particular, I have been interested in “label bias,” or situations where the outcome of interest used to train RAIs are a biased proxy variable for the true outcome of interest, e.g., the case of algorithms trained using arrest data that are meant to predict future criminal offending. With Sharad Goel and Julian Nyarko, I have studied the statistical conditions under which label bias means we should include fewer predictors in our RAI. With Roland Neil, I wrote an article forthcoming in the Annual Review of Criminology about the importance of criminology research on the arrest-offending link by race, and the implications of this research for RAIs trained on arrest and predicting offending. Lastly, with Lindsay Graef, I am finalizing an article studying the impact of using bench warrants as a proxy for failure to appear in RAIs.

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If you are interested in speaking about these projects or collaborating, please send me an email!