About Kathleen Powell

Kathleen Powell is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Criminology and Justice Studies, with a joint affiliation with the Center for Public Policy. Broadly, her research examines the various impacts of involvement with the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

She focuses on identifying person-level outcomes of being arrested, on community supervision, or incarcerated. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, her research is often grounded in the life course paradigm and/or the social stress process. Her recent scholarship includes an investigation of age-based variation in mental health following justice system involvement that highlighted the concentrated adverse consequences of incarceration during late adolescence and the transition to adulthood for individuals’ depression and anxiety. Similar papers include a study of occupational stress among public defenders and inequality in earnings following arrest and incarceration in early adulthood.