Alexes Harris

About

Alexes Harris is a sociologist and a Presidential Term Professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Sociology. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2002. Her research employs a mixed-method approach to study institutional decision-making, with a focus on social stratification processes and racial and ethnic disparities. Harris investigates how contact with various institutions such as educational, juvenile, criminal justice, and economic systems impacts individuals' life chances. Her work combines data types like participant observation, interviews, and statistical analysis to explore how institutional actors assess, label, and process individuals and groups, and how those processed respond. Her aim is to produce theoretically informed and empirically rich research that informs local, state, and national policy arenas. Harris has taught undergraduate courses on race and ethnicity, social problems, juvenile justice, and special topics courses related to credit markets, criminal sentencing, sports, higher education, and race. She also teaches graduate-level research methods courses on qualitative research methods. Her current research project, 'A Pound of Flesh,' examines the relationship between the U.S. systems of social control and inequality, specifically analyzing policies and mechanisms within the criminal justice system that impose and monitor sanctions on poor people who do not pay their legal debts. Her work…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Law
• Criminology
• Finance
• Law and economics
• Psychology
• Monetary economics
• Social psychology
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• Monetary Sanctions: Legal Financial Obligations in US Systems of Justice

  Annual Review of Criminology · 2017-10-14 · 176 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This review assesses the current state of knowledge about monetary sanctions, e.g., fines, fees, surcharges, restitution, and any other financial liability related to contact with systems of justice, which are used more widely than prison, jail, probation, or parole in the United States. The review describes the most important consequences of the punishment of monetary sanctions in the United States, which include a significant capacity for exacerbating economic inequality by race, prolonged con…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Monetary Sanctions: A Review of Revenue Generation, Legal Challenges, and Reform

  Annual Review of Law and Social Science · 2019-10-10 · 58 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The Ferguson Report became a watershed moment for understanding the costs and consequences of the monetary sanctions system for communities of color. Since that time, myriad reports, studies, and commissions have uncovered evidence that suggests that Ferguson, Missouri, was not an outlier but rather part of a broader set of systems throughout the country that relied on increasingly punitive assessment and collection strategies for revenue. The growth and expansion of these systems continue to ha…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Studying the System of Monetary Sanctions

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022-01-01 · 43 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  some people are able to pay to be released from jail prior to adjudication (see Bail presents a somewhat unique case in that it is ostensibly refundable at the conclusion of a case. However, our research shows that at least a portion of sentenced fines and fees can be deducted from bail monies before refunding them, which makes bail a special prepaid form of monetary sanctions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Justice “cost points”

  Criminology & Public Policy · 2019-05-01 · 36 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  RESEARCH SUMMARY: In addition to outsourcing the management of correctional facilities, many local and state authorities contract with private companies to provide a variety of services and processes within U.S. courthouses, jails, and prisons. In this article, we explore the various "cost points" at which individuals who make contact with public systems of justice are charged by private entities. We provide two case studies with an in-depth look at how private companies make money within U.S. j…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Broad Scope and Variation of Monetary Sanctions: Evidence From Eight States

  CrimRxiv · 2020-01-01 · 33 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Monetary sanctions have long been a part of the U.S. criminal justice system but have received increasing attention from the public as well as legal scholars and social science research in recent years. This essay describes initial findings from the Multi-State Study of Monetary Sanctions, a multi-method study designed to build on the prior research on legal financial obligations (LFOs) by examining the multi-tiered systems of monetary sanctions operating within eight states representing key reg…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michele Cadigan

  10 shared

• Sarah Shannon

  University of Georgia

  10 shared

• Tyler J. S. Smith

  University of Bristol

  7 shared

• Katherine Beckett

  University of Washington

  6 shared

• Ryan Larson

  Hamline University

  6 shared

• Bryan L. Sykes

  5 shared

• Frank Edwards

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  5 shared

• Christopher Uggen

  University of Minnesota

  5 shared

Labs

• Alexes Harris LabPI

Awards & honors

• Alexes Harris Named University's Faculty Athletic Representa…
• Alexes Harris Receives Arnold Foundation Grant to Study Mone…
• Professor Harris Receives 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award…
• Alexes Harris joins colleages in the Washington State Academ…

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