Erin Eife

Assistant Professor

Punishment, surveillance, pretrial justice, courts

Erin Eife is an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. Before her time at George Mason, she was an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She is primarily interested in the pretrial stage of the criminal legal system and how it impacts access to citizenship rights in the United States.

Erin’s current book project (under contract with NYU Press) investigates pretrial release, surveillance, and the citizenship rights of people awaiting adjudication in Cook County, Illinois. Drawing on courtroom observations and 58 in-depth interviews, she illustrates how people on pretrial release experience liminal punishment, calling into question the idea that all people are truly innocent until proven guilty.

Other projects also interrogate the connections between inequality and pretrial surveillance. First, during her time as an NSF Fellow, she completed data collection in two rural counties in the Midwest to better understand the impact of race, space, and type of criminalized behavior in the courtroom. Second, she is currently examining the health effects of being charged with a crime to examine whether surveillance functions as a social determinant of health, with an eye towards promoting health equity. Finally, as a part of the Jail Justice Initiative, Erin studies the role of jails in the broader context of the US criminal-legal system.

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, ACLS/Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Some of her work can be found in Social Problems, Punishment & Society, Journal of Criminal Justice, Law & Social Inquiry, Social Currents, and the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma.

Selected Publications

Friday, Gabreèlla, Kaitlyn M. Sims, and Erin Eife. Forthcoming. “Jailization: Entering the Lobby to the US Criminal-Legal System.” Punishment & Society.

Eife, Erin and Brian Tuohy. 2025. “The Carceral State Beyond Bars: Pretrial Surveillance as a Social Determinant of Health.” Social Science & Medicine. 386.

Erin Eife, Traci Schlesinger, Hayley Carlisle, Chardonae Pendleton, and Ian de Wet. 2025. “The Underside of Bond Reform: An Examination of the Harmful and Uneven Implementation of Restrictive Conditions of Release.” Journal of Criminal Justice.

Umamaheswar, Janani, Peyton Frye, Erin Eife, and Sydney Ingel. 2025. “Pretrial processing and the making of incipient carceral citizens.” Punishment & Society.

Eife, Erin. 2025. “Liminal Punishment and the Specter of Jail.” Social Problems.

Eife, Erin and Beth E. Richie. 2022. “Punishment by Association: The Burden of Attending Court for Legal Bystanders.” Law & Social Inquiry.

Eife, Erin. 2021. “No Justice, No Peace?: Protest Participation for People with Criminal Legal Contact.” Social Currents.

Eife, Erin and Gabriela Kirk (equal authorship). 2021. “And you will wait’: Carceral Transportation in Electronic Monitoring as Part of the Punishment Process.” Punishment & Society.

Richie, Beth E. and Erin Eife. 2020. “Black Bodies at the Dangerous Intersection of Gender Violence and Mass Criminalization.” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma.

Courses Taught

CRIM 100: Introduction to Criminal Justice

CRIM 315: Research Methods and Analysis in Criminology

CRIM 544: Corrections

Education

Ph.D., Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago (2021)

M.A., Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago (2017)

M.A., Social Sciences, University of Chicago (2014)

B.A., Sociology and Politics, Fairfield University (2012)