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As of August 11, 2021, George Mason University will require all individuals on our campus to wear masks indoors, including classrooms and laboratories, regardless of vaccination status. For more information, please see Mason’s updated mask policy.
The criminology, law and society faculty have combined expertise in a number of substantive and methodological areas, including justice health, public opinion research, policing, corrections, juvenile justice, and law in action. Faculty members receive many research awards from governments and foundations. Please see individual faculty pages for information on current projects.
A research center and two research labs are affiliated with the department and give faculty and students the opportunity to collaboratively participate in research that will be used to advance knowledge and improve the administration of justice. Links to each are below.
The Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy (CEBCP) seeks to make scientific research a key component in decisions about crime and justice policies by advancing rigorous studies in criminal justice and criminology and proactively serving as an informational link to practitioners and the policy community.
The Early Justice Strategies (EJS) lab conducts research on strategies to facilitate community release, supervision, and connection to services and supports for individuals who are justice-involved. Many projects focus specifically on front-end criminal-legal processing such as police-, jail-, and court-based interventions.
The Modeling Decision-Making in the Legal System (MoDiLS) laboratory conducts multi-method research on decision-making in the criminal justice system, examining whether decisions are knowing, intelligent, voluntary, and reliable in interrogation situations, guilty plea negotiations, and in mental health courts. The lab also emphasizes research on wrongful convictions and methods to prevent miscarriages of justice.
