About

This aim of this blog is to share research and activities with practitioners and students in criminal justice. It contains information relating both to the UK and USA justice systems. The focus is on children, adolescents, and young adults who are at risk or justice involved.

The author of Juvenile Justice Psych is Dr Sally-Ann Ashton. Sally-Ann has an MPhil in Criminological Research from the University of Cambridge (2008) and an MSc in Investigative Psychology from the University of Huddersfield (2015). For her MPhil she wrote a long dissertation on the impact of cultural heritage program on the self concept of Black male prisoners in English prisons. Her MSc dissertation explored the offending patterns of gang members and leavers using data from the Pathways to Desistance Study. She expanded this research for her PhD on the relationship of psychological and social risk factors to offending and desistance in a sample male gang and group offenders, which she completed in 2019 at the University of Huddersfield.

She began working in English prisons in 2003 as part of an outreach program as part of her role as a senior curator in charge of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. After leaving the museum to focus her career on researching the criminal justice system she was a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) and program leader for an MSc in the Applied Management of Offending Behavior. She has worked as a research scientist at the Texas Juvenile Crime Prevention Center at Prairie View A&M University since February 2022.

Her current research interests include: Social and psychological risk factors associated with adolescent and young adult offenders; violent offending; organised crime; gangs and co-offending; design and evaluation of juvenile offending behavioral programs; child criminal and sexual exploitation; desistance narratives; childhood risk factors and veterans in the CJS; policing of vulnerable populations; forensic/investigative psychology. 

Sally-Ann was a recipient of a National Gang Crime Research Center Frederic Milton Thrasher Award for ‘superior accomplishments in gang research’ in 2017 and for ‘superior accomplishments in gang training’ in 2020. She was also a recipient of a Churchill Fellowship in 2019 to research gang interventions and prevention in the US.

Research and the work of others is referenced. All comments and opinions are my own.