Faculty Profiles

John M. MacDonald
Chair, Department of Criminology,
Associate Professor of Criminology,
Undergraduate Chair

B.A., 1994, Vassar College; M.A., 1996, Ph.D., 1999, University of Maryland

Email: johnmm@sas.upenn.edu
Links to published papers
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Research Areas

Professor MacDonald works on a wide variety of topics in criminology that include the study of interpersonal violence, race and ethnic disparities in criminal justice, and the effectiveness of social policy responses to crime.

Recent Grant Awards

"School Environment as a Mechanism to Reduce Youth Violence and Victimization." Co-Principal Investigator with N. Nicosia. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2009-2013.

The major goals of this project are to expand our understanding of the epidemiology of youth violence by analyzing the role of the school as a mediating protective factor. We theorize that improving the school environment is an important mediating factor in reducing aggregate rates of youth violence and victimization. Improving school environments can also putatively foster changing systemic aspects of communities linked to youth violence (e.g., disorder, social cohesion, collective efficacy). Given the lack of experimental evidence, we rely on natural experiments to generate exogenous variation in school environments and assess their effects on youth violence at multiple levels including state, districts, and schools. This approach is commonly used to estimate a causal impact on academic achievement, but has not been applied widely to youth violence outcomes.

“The Role of Race/Ethnicity in Criminal Justice Adjudications,” Co-Principal Investigator with N. Nicosia. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), 2008-2011.

The major goals of this project are to examine the adjudication of drug offenders in California to determine the extent to which race/ethnicity has played a role in final disposition and referral to drug treatment. The study considers temporal and geographic patterns in disparities at each stage of the adjudication process within a single state subject to the same rule of law. Finally, by considering the impact of restorative justice policies, such as drug courts and diversion, on the processing of drug offenders by race/ethnicity, this project will assist policymakers with efforts to reduce disparities in the criminal justice and treatment system.

“The Impact of Business Improvement Districts on Youth Violence.” Principal Investigator. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2005-2009.

The major goals of this project are to evaluate the effectiveness of local business improvement districts in Los Angeles in fostering community-level change and reductions in youth violence.

Academic Positions Held

1998-1999: Program Specialist, National Institute of Justice, US Department of Justice
1999-2003: Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of South Carolina
2001-2003: Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina
2002-2003: Assistant Department Chair, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of South Carolina
2004: Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of Florida
2004-2006: Behavioral Scientist, RAND Corporation
2006: Professor of Policy Analysis, The Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy
2006-2010: Jerry Lee Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania
2008-present: Undergraduate Chair, Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania
2010-present: Director, Jerry Lee Center of Criminology

Representative Publications

“Gender Bias and Juvenile Justice Revisited: A Multi-year Analysis,” with M. Chesney-Lind, Crime and Delinquency, 47, 173-195, 2001.

“The Effectiveness of Community Policing in Reducing Urban Violence,” Crime and Delinquency, 48, 592-618, 2002.

“The Effect of Ethnicity on Juvenile Court Outcomes in Hawaii,” Youth and Society, 35, 243-263, 2003.

“Combating Domestic Violence in Rural America: Findings from an Evaluation of a Local Domestic Violence Court,” with A. Gover and G. Alpert, Criminology and Public Policy, 3, 109-132, 2003.

“Studying Frequency of Arrest Among Paroled Youthful Offenders,” with P. Lattimore, A.R. Piquero, R.L. Linster, and C.A. Visher, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 41, 37-57, 2004.

“The Relationship Between Violent Offending and Death by Homicide: A Test of the General Theory of Crime,” with A.R. Piquero, A. Dobrin, L. Daigle, and F. Cullen, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 21, 55-71, 2005.

“Police Suspicion and Discretionary Decision Making During Citizen Stops,” with G. Alpert and R. Dunham, Criminology, 43, 407-434, 2005.

“The Efficacy of the Rio Hondo DUI Court: A 2-Year Field Experiment,” with A.R. Morral, B. Raymond, and C. Eibner, Evaluation Review, 31, 4-23, 2007.

“Race, Neighborhood Context, and Perceptions of Injustice by the Police,“ with R. Stokes, G. Ridgeway, and K.J. Riley, Urban Studies, 13, 2567-2585, 2007.

“Overdispersion and Poisson Regression,” with R. Berk, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 24, 269–284, 2008.

“The Dynamic Relationship between Homicide Rates and Social, Economic, and Political Factors from 1970 to 2000,” with P. McCall and K. F. Parker. Social Science Research, 37, 721-735, 2008.

“The Dynamics of Crime Regimes,” with R. Berk. Criminology, 47, 971-1008, 2009.

“Doubly Robust Internal Benchmarking and False Discovery Rates for Detecting Racial Bias in Police Stops,” with G. Greg Ridgeway. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 104, 661-668, 2009.

“The Effect of Less-lethal Weapons on Injuries in Police Use of Force Events,“ with R. Kaminski and M. Smith. American Journal of Public Health, 99, 2268-2274, 2009.

“A Developmental Approach for Measuring the Severity of Crimes,” with R. Ramchand, A. Haviland, and A. Morral. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 25, 129-153, 2009.

“The Relationship between Violent and Nonviolent Criminal Activity among Serious Adolescent Offenders,“ with A. Haviland and A. Morral. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 46, 553-580, 2009.

“The Effect of Light Rail Transit on Body Mass Index and Physical Activity,“ American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 39, 105-113, 2010.

“The Effect of Business Improvement Districts on the Incidence of Violent Crimes,“ with D. Golinelli, R. Stokes, and R. Bluthenthal. Injury Prevention, 2010.

“Policing the Homeless: An Evaluation of Efforts to Reduce Homeless-Related Crime,“ with R. Berk. Criminology and Public Policy, 9, 2010.

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