Our Faculty

JEFFREY FAGAN, JD, is a professor of Law and Public Health at Columbia University, director of the Center for Crime, Community and Law at Columbia Law School, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Columbia Center on Youth Violence Prevention at the Mailman School of Public Health. His research and scholarship focuses on crime, law and social policy, and current research examines capital punishment, racial profiling, legal socialization of adolescents, the jurisprudence of adolescent crime, and perceived legitimacy of the criminal law. Professor Fagan served on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academy of Science from 2000-2006, and as the Committee's vice chair for the last two years. From 1996-2006, he was a member of the MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice. He is a founding member of the National Consortium on Violence Research, the Working Group on Legitimacy and the Criminal Law of the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Working Group on Incarceration at Russell Sage. From 2002-2005, Professor Fagan received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and was a Soros Senior Justice Fellow for 2005-6. From 1994-98, he served on the standing peer review panel (IRG) for violence research at the National Institute for Mental Health. He is past editor of the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and serves on the editorial boards of several journals on criminology and law. He also has served as executive counselor on the boards of both the American Society of Criminology and the Crime and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association. He received the Bruce Stone Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. His book, Changing Borders of Juvenile Justice (Chicago, 2000) was named Best Book in 2002 on Social Policy and Adolescence, by the Society for Research on Adolescence.

PhD, SUNY, 1975

MS, SUNY, 1971

BA, New York University, 1968

Mailman School Affiliations:

• Center for Violence Research and Prevention 

University Affiliations:

• Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy
• Institute for Child and Family Policy
• Center for Crime, Community and Law

Additional Affiliations:

• Fellow, American Society of Criminology
• Committee for Law and Justice
• Fellow, National Consortium on Violence Research
• Member, MacArthur Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice

• RWJ Health Policy Investigator Award, 2002
• Soros Senior Justice Fellowship, 2005
• Fellow, American Society of Criminology, 2001
• Bruce Stone Award, Association of Criminal Justice Sciences, 1998

Selected Editorial Boards

• Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
• Journal of Quantitative Criminology
• Crime and Justice: Review of Research

Violence Epidemiology
As part of the Columbia Center on Youth Violence Prevention, Professor Fagan directs a violence epidemiology program that analyzes patterns and trends in youth violence. Both lethal and non-lethal violence trends are monitored. Both individual and neighborhood characteristics of violence have been analyzed. Changes in neighborhood and individual rates over time are analyzed as a function of changing social, political and economic factors. Special analyses include the spatial epidemiology of violence against women, and the effects of legal interventions on trajectories of violence in New York City neighborhoods. A recent set of analyses has looked at the spread and decline in violence as an infectious disease, applying models of social contagion to explain changing patterns over time.

Gun Violence and Injury
Professor Fagan has served as an expert witness in three civil lawsuits in New York City that allege injuries to victims of gun violence that are attributable to the actions of gun manufacturers and distributors that fail to regulate and control the flow of firearms into the hands of unauthorized users.

Juvenile Justice
New York has one of the nation's harshest laws for responding to adolescents who commit crimes, treating most serious juvenile offenders as adults. Professor Fagan has been involved in research for over a decade that is an ongoing natural experiment comparing the court responses, sentences, punishments and recidivism of youths in New York compared to youths in other states where the laws permit traditional juvenile justice responses to adolescent crimes.