I am a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. My research is in the sociology of punishment, focusing in particular on the punitive turn in the U.S. through the lenses of policing, probation, and prisons. Articles from these projects have been published in top interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals, including Social Problems (Phelps & Cueto-Villalobos 2025; Phelps & Ruhland 2022), Law & Society Review (Powell & Phelps 2021; Phelps 2011), Law & Social Inquiry (Piehowski & Phelps 2023), Punishment & Society (Phelps 2017), Theoretical Criminology (Phelps & Seligman 2024; Rubin & Phelps 2017; Goodman, Page, & Phelps 2015), Sociology of Race & Ethnicity (Phelps & Hamilton 2021), Mobilization (Phelps, Ward, & Frazier 2021), Annual Review of Criminology (Phelps 2020), and Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences (Phelps 2016).* My team's article in American Journal of Sociology (Phelps, Robertson, & Powell 2021) on the ambivalent attitudes of marginalized neighborhood residents about police reform won the 2023 American Society of Criminology's Joan Petersilia Outstanding Article Award.

Together with Philip Goodman (University of Toronto) and Joshua Page (University of Minnesota), I am the author of Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (Oxford, 2017), which traces the history of U.S. criminal justice reforms from the birth of the penitentiary to contemporary struggles to end mass incarceration. My second book, The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America (Princeton, 2024), explores the Black Lives Matter protests and politics of police reform in Minneapolis before and after the murder of George Floyd, and won the Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction at the 2025 Minnesota Book Awards.

To learn more, you can view my C.V. or Biography or click on the tabs above for Research, Media & Other Writing, and Teaching. I'm also on bluesky and Google Scholar.

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