Building a case for change
Amelia Roskin-Frazee hates unanswered questions. As an undergrad, she began exploring the relationship between identity and the policing of sex crimes, but quickly realized existing research left some significant gaps.
“When I couldn’t find answers in existing literature, grad school was a logical next step so I could address those questions myself,” she says.
After earning her bachelor’s in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Columbia University, she was accepted into the UC Irvine sociology Ph.D. program.
“My research didn’t really fit neatly within any one field, and sociology tends to gather people whose work spans multiple disciplines,” she says. And UCI offered the full package: money, health insurance, housing, and most importantly, the people.
“UCI has an amazing network of faculty doing sociolegal scholarship, and the department felt very collaborative,” she says.
Her research examines how race and gender affect how sex crime cases are processed in the U.S. criminal legal system. Her work combines large-scale quantitative analysis with in-depth interviews to study the discretionary decisions of frontline actors — prosecutors, law enforcement — while tracing how those decisions accumulate into systematic inequality even in the absence of explicit bias.
“Ultimately,” she says, “my research contradicts existing assumptions in sociological literature that sex crime prosecutions are less susceptible to race-, gender-, and class-based bias.”
She’s had several studies published while at UCI, including works in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy; Feminist Criminology; Sociology Compass; and Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, as well as a forthcoming law review article in American Criminal Law Review.
Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Society of Criminology, and the UCI Law Initiative to End Family Violence, in addition to the UC Irvine Graduate Division and the School of Social Sciences.
Her list of activities as an Anteater is quite lengthy, including progressively higher leadership posts in the Associated Graduate Students of UCI, for which she serves as current president, and multiyear stints on the UCIPD Police Accountability Board and Student Health Insurance Advisory Committee. And her accumulated awards and accomplishments are even more impressive, with fellowships and accolades spanning from the American Society of Criminology Division on Feminist Criminology Graduate Paper Award and Western Society of Criminology Miki-Vohryzek-Bolden Student Paper Award to being a predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Most recently, she was named the recipient of the School of Social Sciences Justice and Equity Research Paper Award — an honor that recognizes the school’s top research paper addressing race, racism, equity and justice — for her work, entitled “Therapeutic Retribution: How Prosecutors Legitimize Carceral Severity in the Era of Progressive Prosecution.”
As she gets ready to defend her dissertation this month and join UC Berkeley Law in the fall, Roskin-Frazee took some time to share more about what drives her passion for the law, what’s filled her time as an Anteater and what’s next.
Q: Where did your interest in law come from? Are there any unique life experiences that have guided your educational journey?
A: My commitment to studying the criminal legal system grew out of personal experience with how institutions respond — or fail to respond — when people are harmed. As a queer person and someone living with a disability, I have also navigated systems that were not built with people like me in mind, an experience that taught me to pay close attention to who institutions serve and who they overlook. Those experiences left me with questions I couldn't set aside, and over time they became the foundation of a research agenda focused on how race, gender, and sexuality shape who the criminal legal system protects and who it punishes.
Q: Beyond your research and coursework, what organizations and causes have been central to your UC Irvine experience?
A: Truly, most of my time over the past several years has been doing work for Associated Graduate Students of UCI (AGS), which has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. In the rare times I’m not running to a hiring committee meeting or sending memos to administrators about university policies, I do advocacy for LGBTQ+ youth through donating books on gender and sexuality to schools and homeless shelters and play steel drums.
Q: Who have been your faculty mentors while here, and what impact have they had on your graduate career?
A: I have been lucky to have amazing faculty mentors, especially my committee — David Frank (my dissertation chair), David Meyer, Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Kelley Fong, and Trevor Hoppe (UNC), and other scholars in our department who have helped support my work over the years like Stan Bailey, Kristin Turney, and Irene Vega. When I came to grad school, I saw myself primarily as a gender studies scholar who didn’t really fit into my department. Over time, the mentorship I have received has helped me expand my work to focus more on law. I am also so thankful for the patience my mentors had with me learning research methods. Coming from a humanities background into a social sciences discipline was a bit jarring at first, but my advisor was always supportive, and that helped me feel comfortable exploring new methods I hadn’t used before like statistical analysis and in-depth interviews.
Q: When do plan to complete your Ph.D.? What are your plans thereafter? How has UCI prepared you well for this role?
A: I am defending my dissertation later in June. In August, I will start law school at UC Berkeley Law as a Public Interest Scholar. My doctoral training in sociology at UC Irvine has prepared me well for law school. Working closely with a committee that bridges sociology and law taught me to think rigorously about legal institutions and to take seriously how doctrine plays out in practice. And perhaps nothing has prepared me more than my work in Associated Graduate Students of UCI. Through being President, I have had the opportunity to work with administrators across the university to advocate for graduate students, from getting the graduate Basic Needs referendum passed to cutting the healthcare premium for dependents on our health insurance in half. Regardless of what I do after law school, I know it will involve some combination of advocacy and scholarship, and UCI has prepared me well for both things.