Research Scientist Index
CV (PDF)

Bio:
Amanda Geller is an Associate Research Scientist at the Columbia University School of Social Work, with a joint appointment at the School of Law. Her research examines the interactions between criminal justice and urban social structure, and their joint effects on urban residents, families, and communities.  She is a faculty affiliate of the Columbia Population Research Center, and leads the Center’s Incarceration Working Group.

Dr. Geller completed her Ph.D. in Social Policy Analysis at the Columbia University School of Social Work in 2007, and her Master of Engineering and Bachelor of Science degrees from Cornell University in 2000 and 1999, respectively. She worked as an Associate Operations Researcher at the RAND Corporation from 2000-2003.

Research Interests:

• Incarceration in Fragile Families
• Police-Citizen Interactions
• Neighborhood Conditions, Crime, and Inequality
• Legal Socialization among Urban Youth
• Housing Policy
• Capital Punishment

Current Projects:

• Secondary analysis of the effects of incarceration on fathers’ involvement with their children (Funded by the National Center for Family and Marriage Research, Principal Investigator)
• Survey of young men in New York City about their experiences with the police and the effects of police contact on their legal socialization. (Funded by the National Institute of Justice)
• Identifying racial, socioeconomic, and neighborhood disparities in the administration of justice, their structural and procedural causes, and their effects on urban individuals and communities.
• Analysis of the role of paternal incarceration in urban families, including domains such as housing security, economic stability, and children’s behavioral and cognitive development.
• Identifying individual and family predictors of children’s early delinquency and criminality.

Journal Articles
Geller, A., Cooper, C. E., Garfinkel, I., Schwartz-Soicher, O., & Mincy, R. B.  (Forthcoming, 2012). “Beyond Absenteeism: Father Incarceration and Child Development.” Demography.

Schwartz-Soicher, O., Geller, A., & Garfinkel, I. (Forthcoming, 2011). “The Effects of Paternal Incarceration on Material Hardship.” Social Service Review.

Geller, A. and Curtis, M. A. (2011). “A Sort of Homecoming: Incarceration and the housing insecurity of urban men.” Social Science Research. 40 (4): 1196-1213.

Geller, A., Garfinkel, I., & Western, B. (2011). “Paternal Incarceration and Support for Children in Fragile Families.” Demography.

Geller, A. & Fagan, J. (2010). “Pot as Pretext: Marijuana, Race, and the New Disorder in New York City Street Policing.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 7(4), 591-633.

Geller, A., Garfinkel, I., Cooper, C. E., & Mincy, R. B. (2009). “Parental Incarceration and Child Wellbeing: Implications for Urban Families.” Social Science Quarterly, 90(5), 1186-1202.

Fagan, J., Zimring, F. E., & Geller, A. (2006). “Capital Punishment and Capital Murder: Market Share and the Deterrent Effects of the Death Penalty.” University of Texas Law Review, 84, 1803-1867.

Book Chapters
Fagan, J., Geller, A., Davies, G., & West, V. (2010). Street stops and Broken Windows revisited: The demography and logic of proactive policing in a safe and changing city.  In Race, Ethnicity, and Policing: New and essential readings, edited by S. K. Rice and M. D. White.  New York, NY: NYU Press.


Selected Presentations:

Employment and Incarceration
New York City Human Resources Administration, Office of Child Support Enforcement, 2011 Policy Conference (October 2011)

Data Needs in the Assessment of Crime Trends: New York City as Example and Cautionary Tale.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice (September 2011)

Invited Testimony on Children of Incarcerated Parents
New York City Council (2011)

Spillover, False Positives, and the Demography of Urban Policing (With Jeffrey Fagan)
Population Association of America (2011).

Beyond Absenteeism: Father Incarceration and its Effects on Children’s Development (With Carey E. Cooper, Irwin Garfinkel, Ofira Schwartz-Soicher, and Ronald B. Mincy)
Cornell University Department of Policy Analysis and Management (2011); American Society of Criminology (2010); Population Association of America (2009)

A Sort of Homecoming: Incarceration and housing insecurity among urban men. (With Marah A. Curtis)
Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (2010); Emerging Scholars Poster Session at the HHS Welfare Research and Evaluation Conference (2010); Population Association of America (2010)