About

David Ramey is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology with a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, earned in 2014, and a B.A. from Arizona State University. His research and teaching interests encompass criminology, medical sociology, and social control. He studies the relationships between race/ethnicity, misbehavior or crime, and the use of formal and informal social control. His primary research examines the use of punitive responses to childhood misbehavior versus the use of therapy and/or medication, as well as racial disparities in school punishment and the use of therapy or medication to control behavior problems. Additionally, he is involved in projects analyzing the diffusion of school accountability, disability, and disciplinary policies over time and across states, and how legislation influences disciplinary practices and disparities. He also researches the militarization of law enforcement, focusing on how police militarization affects police use of force, responses to protests or civil unrest, and instances of police-involved shootings.

Research topics

• Criminology
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Demography
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• The Color of State Governance: Examining the Primacy of Race in Social Welfare and Criminal Justice Spending Across Multiple Levels of Government

  Sociological Inquiry · 2025-03-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Over the past 50 years, scholars have documented a retrenchment of social welfare systems alongside an expansion of criminal justice systems across the United States. Yet, research rarely examines whether these trends can be explained by similar underlying processes. Likewise, scholars rarely consider the structure of American federalism when studying state governance is exercised across state, county, and city governments. In this paper, we merge data on state, county, and city social welfare and criminal justice spending data from the Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances (ASG) with data from multiple sources and employ seemingly unrelated regression models to examine changes in social welfare and criminal justice spending across a period of increasing state punitiveness. Specifically, we examine whether state, county, and city Black populations are associated with social welfare or criminal justice spending across multiple levels of government between 1982 and 2020. Our findings demonstrate that racial composition is associated with spending in ways that are consistent with minority threat and similar narratives surrounding state governance. Furthermore, this relationship persists across United States, counties, and cities, though to different degrees across these levels of governance, while the influence of political and economic factors is less consistent.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• For law enforcement purposes: The complicated relationship between the 1033 program and the expanding police mandate

  Journal of Criminal Justice · 2024-02-27 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Tailgates, Traffic, Police Militarization, and the Shadow of the Next School Shooting: Campus Police and the 1033 Program

  American Journal of Criminal Justice · 2024-12-30

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the relationships between school suspension, ADHD diagnoses, and delinquency across different school punitive and special education climates

  Children and Youth Services Review · 2023-02-04 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Controlling Defiance: An Examination of School Social Control in California School Districts

  Sociological Perspectives · 2022-08-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  U.S. schools suspend 2.5 million children each school year. Although states mandate suspensions for serious offenses, most students are suspended for minor transgressions, such as “willful defiance” of authority. Moreover, districts suspend students of color for minor issues at higher rates than White children. In response, California banned suspension for “willful defiance” in elementary schools statewide in 2015 and larger districts eliminated the practice for all grades throughout the 2010s. In this article, we use California Department of Education (CDE) data from 2011 to 2018 to determine: (1) whether banning suspension for willful defiance changes school district suspension rates; (2) whether these bans are associated with changes in special education enrollment; and (3) how these relationships differ by the race/ethnicity of the student.

  PublisherDOI

• Impact of Extralegal and Community Factors on Police Officers’ Decision to Book Arrests for Minor Offenses

  American Journal of Criminal Justice · 2022-04-19 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Recent developments in school social control

  Sociology Compass · 2019-12-29 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In the U.S., decisions regarding social control are increasingly modeled on two dominant institutions: the criminal justice and medical/healthcare systems. Sociologists and other scholars refer to this adoption of legal and/or medical terminology and technologies as criminalization and medicalization. These models of social control are particular evident in how America defines and manages child behavior. Public schools borrow from both the criminal justice and medical systems as part of the routine educational setting. In this article, I provide the first synthesis and review of the school criminalization and medicalization literatures. In doing so, I argue that criminalized school social controls provide harsh, repressive responses to student misbehavior, while medicalized school social controls provide rehabilitative and restitutive responses. Given these fundamentally different approaches to student behavior, I argue that the disproportionate use of criminalized and medicalized social control across racial/ethnic groups and children from different socioeconomic backgrounds entrenches inequalities and functions to channel racial/ethnic minorities and poor children into the school‐to‐prison pipeline while keeping socially advantaged children in school and away from the problems associated with criminalized social control.

  PublisherDOI

• Early exposure to neighborhood crime and child internalizing and externalizing behaviors

  Health & Place · 2019-05-01 · 20 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Police militarization in the <scp>United States</scp>

  Sociology Compass · 2019-02-27 · 21 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract In 2014, police responses to protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri, prompted an unprecedented level of news coverage on the phenomenon of police militarization. Though the increased attention to police militarization and governmental programs thought to facilitate it (e.g., the 1033 Program) may give the impression that police militarization is a recent phenomena, social scientists have been documenting trends in police militarization for decades. This article provides an overview of the social science research literature on police militarization, starting with a discussion of a theory informed conceptualization of police militarization. We next discuss the major normative debates that have guided research on police militarization. We then review the empirical literature that focuses on the methodological approaches and findings of extant work on police militarization. Finally, we close with an overview of the state of the literature and suggestions for future research. Our major suggestion for future work is to consider the dimensions of police work that police militarization can occur in while continuing to engage with the normative debates of previous scholars so as to improve the overall quality of police work and public safety in the United States.

  PublisherDOI

• Punitive versus Medicalized Responses to Childhood Behavior Problems and High School Graduation

  Sociological Perspectives · 2019-06-11 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  There are significant racial and socioeconomic disparities in the use of suspensions and therapy/medication for childhood behavior problems. These disparities exacerbate inequalities elsewhere, including academic achievement. In addition, the unequal distribution of child social control also raises the question of whether unobserved heterogeneity between suspended and medicated children may explain the benefits of therapy/medication as an approach to child social control. In this study, I use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979–Child and Young Adult Survey to examine the relationship between early suspension or therapy/medication and high school graduation. Results of logistic regression models show that suspended children have lower odds of graduation than non-suspended/non-medicated children and children who only received therapy/medication. However, results of sibling comparison models that better condition on unobserved factors associated with child social control and academic achievement yield no significant differences in the odds of high school graduation across medicated and suspended siblings.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• School Punishment, Special Education, and Childhood Behavior Problems

  NSF · $258k · 2018–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Emily A. Shrider

  Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

  5 shared

• Trent Steidley

  University of Denver

  3 shared

• Cynthia G. Colen

  The Ohio State University

  3 shared

• Brittany N. Freelin

  Ashland (United States)

  2 shared

• John D. Crum

  Juniata College

  2 shared

• Andrea Corradi

  Georgia Southern University

  2 shared

• Nicole Harrington

  Pennsylvania State University

  1 shared

• Harley Grey Meyer

  1 shared