Dissertation Earns New CJ Prof Gold Medal

CJ professor Jennifer Schulenberg

A new assistant professor in the College of Criminal Justice is a gold medal recipient—not of the Olympic kind, but one that is of as much importance in the Canadian academic world.

Jennifer Schulenberg, a dual citizen of Canada and Switzerland who began teaching at SHSU during the second summer session, was awarded one of the Governor-General’s Gold Medals for outstanding scholarship for the 2004-2005 year.

The national award is given by the Office of the Governor-General (who represents the Queen of England in Canada) to a maximum of 15 recipients a year, though the number given for last year won’t be released until around Christmas.

“It’s the highest honor you can get as an academic coming out of a university. What the gold medal represents is the top student that graduated in that calendar year in all disciplines from that university,” Schulenberg said. “(It’s given for being) upstanding of the highest distinction, essentially, not just in grades, but in community service, in publications, teaching and every aspect of academic work on top of the research being of public interest and having public significance for the country.”

Schulenberg was selected for the award due largely in part to her doctoral dissertation for the University of Waterloo in Ontario, which looked at the use of police decision-making with youth offenders in Canada.

“ We don’t have a whole lot of literature in Canada that speaks to this area; we rely a lot on the literature from the United States,” she said. “In many ways the societies are parallel, and we have a lot of cultural icons that we share, including our institutions of justice.

“ The biggest finding of the study was that the literature of the United States is not necessarily applicable within the Canadian context—even though we have similar policing structures, even though we have similar-sized communities, even though we have youth gangs, even though we have all these other things that are in the demographics for the United States studies—the findings were different.

Other findings include the tendency for Canadian police officers to use their own discretion in whether to arrest a youth, often choosing an informal action instead of arresting, as well as a “revolving door syndrome” in youth being brought to court for minor offenses, and a Canadian version of racial profiling, which Schulenberg said, “nobody wanted to hear.

“ Here in the United States, a disproportionate number of African Americans, for example, are arrested or detained or incarcerated. In Canada, we don’t have a (racial profiling) problem with African Americans, we have a (racial profiling) problem with our indigenous aboriginal population,” she said. “So they are in the area of three times more likely to get arrested, an aboriginal youth, for any offense, regardless of the offense, regardless of their prior record, regardless of where they are.”

The research, done by sampling what would be the equivalent of five to 10 agencies within each U.S. state as well as five to 10 officers within each agency, has been called “unprecedented,” “a bold effort” and “a landmark study” by a series of independent reviewers and those on the gold medal examining committee.

After receiving her doctorate in sociology, a degree many criminologists receive in Canada because of their lack of criminal justice departments, she received a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Centre of Criminology.

“ It’s a competitive process, and 65 percent of the applicants don’t make it, and then 30 percent (receive the fellow, though) it depends on how much money the federal government has coughed up that year,” she said.

After entering the job market, she ran into an individual at a criminology meeting in Nashville who asked her if she had applied to SHSU. Though she was not familiar with the university at that time, she turned in a late application, and is now very happy with her decision to do so, she said.

“Once I got here in January, I fell in love with the place; it’s just incredible,” she said. “The resources, the faculty, the environment, the students; it’s sort of been everything I wanted, a balance between teaching and research and the infrastructure to support both.”

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SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt
July 14, 2005
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