Loretta Stalans

About

Loretta J. Stalans is a Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology and of Psychology, and an affiliated Professor of Women's Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola University Chicago. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Illinois Chicago in 1990, and has taught at Loyola since 1994. Before coming to Loyola, she was an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Center Fellow at the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Georgia State University (1991 to 1994) and a Collaborating Scholar of the American Bar Foundation (1990–1999).

She has given invited talks at University of Cambridge Law School, Public Attitudes to Sentencing Conference in London England, and the NIJ Crime and Justice Research and Evaluation Conference. She has mentored many master’s theses in criminal justice, social psychology, and women’s studies, and has served as an external dissertation committee member for universities in Australia and the United States. She serves on four editorial boards for academic peer-reviewed journals: Law and Human Behavior, Criminal Justice Review, Canadian Journal of Criminology, and Victims and Offenders. She has served as a reviewer for grants for the National Science Foundation Law and Social Science Program and the National Institute of Justice, and serves on the inaugural Scientific Grant Review Panel of the National Institute of Justice Violence Against Women. Her teaching experience and interests include classes at both the undergraduate and graduate level in: research methods, domestic violence, sexual violence, sexual exploitation of children, popular culture, public views about justice, courts, criminal law, and social psychological applications to the criminal justice system. In all of her classes and mentoring, students are encouraged to help the disadvantaged and to respect the environment. Her research skills are wide-ranging, including qualitative interviewing, coding of narratives, quasi-experimental designs, experiments, vignette survey designs, quantitative analysis, and cutting-edge statistical tools including optimal data analysis, classification tree analysis, and ROC analysis.

Selected Publications

She has written two books, including Penal Populism and Public Opinion: International Perspective Across Five Countries (2004) published by Oxford University Press and co-authored with Roberts, Hough, and Indemaur. She has published extensively in the areas of public opinion about justice, police discretionary decision-making, predicting violent or sexual recidivism, taxpayer compliance, and lay and professionals’ stereotypes or expectations about crime and legal procedures. Her research has been supported through grants from the Ford Foundation, and Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. She has published numerous articles in top refereed academic journals, many book chapters, and several technical and grant reports.