Berkeley professor Nikki Jones wins national award for criminology research

UC Berkeley professor Nikki Jones has focused her research around the impact of violence, policing and the criminal legal system on Black people in urban settings, especially Black youth. (Photo courtesy of Nikki Jones) UC Berkeley African American Studies professor Nikki Jones has won the 2020 Michael J. Hindelang Award. The national honor given by the American Society of Criminology (ASC), recognizes a book published within the past three years that makes the most outstanding contribution to research in criminology. Jones recently received the award for her book The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption. Through the use of ethnographic interviews with inner-city police officers and recordings of police encounters collected by and alongside law enforcement, the book delves into the reasons why violence persists in inner cities, despite the presence of adequate funding and resources. According to the American Journal of Sociology , "The Chosen Ones is theoretically astute, methodologically sound and empirically rich, and a model of what ethical, ethnographic research should look like in urban sociology." The Chosen Ones was published by UC Press in 2018. (Photo courtesy of University of California Press) "It's an honor to receive the award and to be recognized by a community of my peers for my scholarly contribution to the discipline," said Jones, who is also a faculty affiliate with Berkeley's Center for the Study of Law and Society.