Speaker Forum Event

Professor Nigel Boyle holds the IGLAS Chair in Political Studies at Pitzer College. He has been a faculty member at Pitzer for 33 years, including a term as Pitzer College Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs. His research was mainly focused on welfare-to-work reform in Britain, Germany, and Ireland.  He was Pitzer’s Fulbright Program Advisor from 1998 to 2023.  He has been involved in prison higher education for the last 12 years, he was the PI for the Mellon grants that created the Justice Education Center, and he has led the Pitzer College prison BA-pathway program which is graduating its fourth cohort this year. Professor Boyle is the architect of the Claremont Colleges’ Justice Education initiative, including the largest concentration of Inside-Out courses (incarcerated and outside students taught in the same classes) in the U.S. As founding Director of the Institute for Global Local Action and Study, Nigel has worked to integrate Pitzer’s renowned study abroad and community engagement programs to help students address Pitzer’s four core educational requirements: local and global intercultural understanding, and social justice theory and practice.

Charis E. Kubrin is Professor of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine. She is also a member of the Council on Criminal Justice, the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice- Network, the Diversity Scholars Network, the Scholars Strategy Network, and UCI’s Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy. Among other topics, Prof. Kubrin’s research assesses the impact of criminal justice reform on crime rates. She has testified on criminal justice reform in California before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, as well as before the Little Hoover Commission. She is a frequent media contributor whose writing has been featured in the The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Forbes, and CNN. Prof. Kubrin has received national awards from the American Society of Criminology including the Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award (for outstanding scholarly contributions to the discipline of criminology), the Herbert Bloch Award (for outstanding service contributions to the ASC and to the professional interests of criminology), and the Coramae Richey Mann Award from the Division on People of Color and Crime (for outstanding contributions of scholarship on race/ethnicity, crime, and justice) as well as from the Western Society of Criminology including the W.E.B. DuBois Award (for significant contributions to racial and ethnic issues in the field of criminology) and the Paul Tappan Award (for outstanding contributions to the field of criminology). In 2019, she was named a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. Prof.Kubrin’s research examines the immigration-crime nexus and considers the impact of immigration-related policy on immigrants, immigrant families and immigrant communities. Another line of research assesses the impact of criminal justice reform on crime rates. A third line of research examines the use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials against young men of color. Prof. Kubrin is also part of the California 100, an statewide initiative to envision and shape the long-term success of the state. Through the California 100 research award, Prof. Kubrin evaluated the current facts, origins and future trends in criminal justice reform in the state.

Born in Canberra, Australia, Daniel studied law and Asian studies at the Australian National University before working for short periods in criminal defense and government legal practice. In 2008, Daniel moved to the United Kingdom where he was Keith Murray Graduate Scholar at Lincoln College, Oxford, reading for an MPhil in Criminology and Criminal Justice and a DPhil (PhD) in Law. Daniel joined City University of Hong Kong in January 2014 as Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2020. He has held visiting positions at universities in Indonesia, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Daniel’s research focuses on criminal law and punishment in comparative perspective, also extending to Southeast Asian law, Islamic law and legal pedagogy. He has published two books and more than 25 journal articles with leading US and international law reviews. Outside of academia, Daniel has worked as a consultant for NGOs Amnesty International and Reprieve. Recently Professor Pascoe published new research in the Northwestern Law Review on Life Without Parole (LWOP) sentencing in the United States. The piece, “Worthless Checks? Clemency, Compassionate Release, and the Finality of Life Without Parole,” presents original empirical data on clemency covering the period 1990–2021 in order to investigate the relationship between LWOP sentences and the release mechanisms of executive clemency and compassionate release in both state and federal cases.