Michael Mueller-Smith
University of Michigan, MI·Social Science·Early-career
Crime carries high social and economic costs in the U.S. Individuals, families and neighborhoods bear these costs in different ways, both directly and indirectly.
- Fields
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
criminal justice
crime
mass incarceration
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Measure how the risk of criminal justice system (CJS) involvement, including conviction numbers and rates, has changed over recent decades and across local geographies, using nationally linked CJARS records.
- Test whether CJS involvement increases household instability for minor children by pairing CJARS records with national survey and administrative data and natural experiments from policy changes.
- Estimate how the rise in mass incarceration will affect retirement in the coming decades by linking justice records with national administrative and survey data.
- Determine whether CJS involvement affects returns on investment for small business loans to entrepreneurs, using linked administrative records and natural experiments.
- Assess how accurate the demographic data collected by criminal justice agencies for operational purposes are, and what poor data quality means for research and policy.
More about the research
Measuring how involvement with the criminal justice system (CJS) affects people's lives requires better data. This project uses the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS), a newly available national data repository. CJARS combines criminal justice records from 42 states and the federal government over a long span of time. The project uses it to study how justice involvement shapes the lives of individuals, families and communities.
Why it matters
Better data-based measures of how the justice system affects ordinary people could inform policymakers working on criminal justice and social programs. The work aims to quantify effects on children's household stability and welfare, retirement for people touched by mass incarceration, small-business outcomes and government program costs. It also aims to flag where flawed demographic data in agency records may mislead analyses.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shabbar Ranapurwala
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Examine racial inequities in Medicaid enrollment and in post-release access to MOUD and mental health care among formerly incarcerated people, using North Carolina's 2023 Medicaid expansion and linked records from 2013–2025.
Jennifer Macy
California State University-Dominguez Hills, CA·Social Science
Trace how Nordic incarceration principles such as dignity, normalization and resocialization have been translated into U.S. correctional policy and practice, using archival documents, interviews and observation at several implementation sites.
Meta Brown
Ohio State University, OH·Social Science
Test whether college costs and the resulting educational debt drive student decisions, using causal analyses of population-level administrative data from the State of Ohio.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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