John R. Hipp is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Criminology, Law and Society, and Sociology, at the University of California Irvine. His research interests focus on how neighborhoods change over time, how that change both affects and is affected by neighborhood crime, and the role networks and institutions play in that change. This inherently multi-level question focuses on the determinants of household decisions for civic involvement or residential mobility: choosing civic involvement may result in a collective action solution to the problems facing a neighborhood, whereas choosing residential mobility may lead a downward spiral with increasing crime and disorder. He approaches these questions using quantitative methods as well as social network analysis.

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Kitty Calavita is Chancellor’s Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She has conducted research and published widely in the field of immigration and immigration lawmaking. Her work is both contemporary and historical, U.S.-based and comparative. Her most recent book, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), examines immigrant marginalization in Italy and Spain, and the formal and informal legal processes that contribute to it. Together with her co-Investigator, Prof. Valerie Jenness, she has launched a new research agenda that will explore some of these issues of race, marginalization, and legal processes within the venue of prisoners’ rights. They are interested specifically in the informal grievance process provided by California law to prison inmates in the State. The study will include archival research into the vast accumulation of prisoners’ "602 forms" that constitute the first step in filing a greivance, as well as interviews with prisoners and administration. The focus will be on prisoners’ rights consciousness as expressed in the narratives on these forms, and the informal back and forth between administration and prisoner as the grievance makes its way up the scale of formality, potentially into the courts. Calavita and Jenness hope to contribute to the scholarship on legal consciousness, as well as the literature on the informal, de facto realm of law and "street-level bureaucrats," a theme that has been a centerpeice of much of their earlier work. They received a seed grant from the UCI Center on Inequality and Social Justice for this work, and a grant from the Law and Social Science Program at the National Science Foundation.

Valerie Jenness is a Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and a Professor in the Department of Sociology at UCI.Her research focuses on the links between deviance and social control (especially law); the politics of crime control and criminalization; social movements and social change; and corrections and public policy.

She is the author of three books and the co-editor of another; in addition, she has published articles in many well-known scholarly journals. Her work has been recognized with awards from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Pacific Sociological Association, and the University of California; translated and reprinted in Japanese, Spanish, and German; presented at an array of professional conferences and universities, as well as to the U.S. Congress and the National Academy of Sciences; and funded by National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the California Policy Research Center, the California Department of Mental Health, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the University of California, and Washington State University. She is a Past Co-Editor of Contemporary Sociology and Past President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She has served as an Associate Editor for Social Problems, as well as an Advisory Editor for Criminology, Social Problems, Gender & Society, Research in Political Sociology, Sexuality & Culture, and Race, Sex and Class.