Devon Johnson

Director of Graduate Programs

Associate Professor

Public opinion on criminal justice issues, race and criminal justice, politics of crime and justice policy, survey methods

Dr. Devon Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. Her current research focuses on punishment preferences and police-citizen relations in the United States and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on understanding racial and ethnic differences in public opinion. Professor Johnson has received awards for her research from the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the Law and Society Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and she is a recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award at Mason. Prior to her appointment at Mason, she was a research associate at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty at UCLA.

Selected Publications

Drakulich, Kevin, Kevin Wozniak, John Hagan, and Devon Johnson. 2020. Race and Policing in the 2016 Presidential Election: Black Lives Matter, the Police, and Dog Whistle Politics. Criminology. 58(2): 370-402.

Johnson, Devon, David B. Wilson, Edward R. Maguire and Belen Lowrey-Kinberg. 2017. Race and Perceptions of Police: Experimental Results on the Impact of Procedural (in)Justice. Justice Quarterly. 34(7): 1184-1212.

Johnson, Devon, Edward R. Maguire, Stephanie A. Maass and Julie Hibdon. 2016. Systematic Observation of Disorder and Other Neighborhood Conditions in a Distressed Caribbean Community. Journal of Community Psychology. 44(6): 729-746.

Johnson, Devon, Patricia Y. Warren and Amy Farrell. 2015. Deadly Injustice: Trayvon Martin, Race, and the Criminal Justice System. New York: New York University Press.

Johnson, Devon, Edward R. Maguire, and Joseph B. Kuhns. 2014. Public Perceptions of the Legitimacy of the Law and Legal Authorities: Evidence from the Caribbean. Law and Society Review. 48(4): 947-978.

Johnson, Devon. 2009. Anger about Crime and Support for Punitive Criminal Justice Policies. Punishment & Society. 11(1): 51-66.

Johnson, Devon. 2008. Racial Prejudice, Perceived Injustice, and the Black-White Gap in Punitive Attitudes. Journal of Criminal Justice. 36(2): 198-206.

Courses Taught

CRIM 100 Introduction to Criminal Justice (F2F and online)

CRIM 305 Crime and Crime Policy

CRIM 307 Social Inequality, Crime and Justice

CRIM 490 Public Opinion, Crime and Justice

CRIM 490 Crime and Politics

CRIM 490 Crime and its Causes

CRIM 491/492 Criminology, Law and Society Honors Seminar

CRIM 495 Capstone in Criminology, Law and Society (F2F and online)

CRIM 561/761 Politics of Crime Policy (Graduate level)

Dissertations Supervised

Salih C. Alexander, Invariance and the Procedural Justice-Legitimacy Relationship for Serious Juvenile Offenders (2022)

Courtney Porter, Gatekeepers of the Juvenile Justice System: Intake Officers, Decision Making and Race Disparities in the Juvenile Justice System (2019)

Daniel K. Pryce, Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and Cooperation with Police: Evidence From a Community of Ghanaian Immigrants (2014)