March 4, 2025
We are excited to announce the 2025 recipient of the Program in Criminal Justice Graduate Student Research Grant. The award process was open to PhD candidates from any of the units on Harvard’s campus conducting research to address questions related to the criminal legal system. Priority was given to students who are conducting research that is timely and whose findings have the potential to shape policy and/or conducting research that tackles an important set of questions related to specific policies in the criminal legal realm.
HANNAH CRAIG — CORPOREAL PUNISHMENT: SKIN TONE, PHYSICAL FEATURES, AND SECURITY CLASSIFICATIONS IN MICHIGAN PRISONS
When individuals become incarcerated, they are assigned a security classification, or risk level score. These security classifications represent a nested form of inequality within the criminal legal system given the highly subjective nature with which they can be deployed to increase the restrictiveness of one’s conditions of incarceration. In the case of the state of Michigan, each incarcerated individual is assigned a security classification from I to V, which determines the type of prison facilities they are held in. This decision directly impacts individuals’ access to program and treatment opportunities, and how far from their home communities individuals are incarcerated. Though research on the impact of skin-tone and other physical characteristics has demonstrated how pre-incarceration outcomes are influenced by physical cues, our knowledge of how these factors influence outcomes during and after incarceration, and across racial groups, is incomplete. Leveraging a novel dataset of administrative data from the Michigan Department of Corrections and webscraped images, this project aims to extend understanding of how skin-tone and other physical features are related to criminal legal outcomes, specifically during incarceration outcomes, by examining the association between other-perceived skin tone and a person’s assigned security classification. Beyond filling a knowledge gap, this study will also confront the empirical puzzle of whether inequality in outcomes experienced during incarceration is carried over from experiences earlier on in the system, such as at the policing, arrest, and/or sentencing stage, as opposed to being accumulated during incarceration.
Hannah Craig is a PhD student in Sociology, as well as a Stone PhD Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration, and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her larger research agenda focuses on the question of how the body and perceived typicality of individuals’ appearances, such as race/ethnicity, skin-tone, attractiveness, and other characteristics, are related to unequal punishment and experiences of incarceration. She employs both quantitative and qualitative methods in her research. She is originally from Michigan, and received a BA in Political Science and Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Michigan. Her research has previously been funded by the Center for American Political Studies.