About Me
Dallas Augustine is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at San José State University. She received her Ph.D. in Criminology, Law & Society from UC Irvine and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco.
Her research examines carceral governance and its role in structuring inequality. She studies how the criminal legal system shapes labor markets, housing precarity, and the governance of marginalized populations across incarceration, reentry, and urban regulation. Through mixed-methods research drawing upon criminology, sociolegal studies, and public health, Dr. Augustine analyzes how contemporary punishment operates both within and beyond carceral spaces, including through labor markets and regulatory systems that organize everyday life.
Her work has been published in Criminology, the British Journal of Criminology, and the American Journal of Public Health, among others.
She also served as President of the Board of Directors of the Orange County Needle Exchange Program where she advocated for and provided direct public health and harm reduction services to people experiencing homelessness, people who use drugs, and other criminalized and regulated populations.
Selected Publications
Augustine, D., Pifer, N., Tublitz, R., Gonzalez, G., Strong, J., Barragan, M., Reiter, K., & Chesnut, K. (2025). Unexceptional Patterns of Solitary Confinement: Cycling and Reentry Shocks within the Prison. British Journal of Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azaf071
Reiter, K., Augustine, D., Barragan, M., Gonzalez, G., Pifer, N., Strong, J., & Tublitz, R. (2025). Against Optimization: Solitary Confinement and the Research-Policy Nexus. Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2025.102470
Augustine, D. (2023). “Coerced work on parole: Prevalence, mechanisms, and characteristics.” Criminology, 61(3), 546-581..
Augustine, D., & Kushel, M. (2022). “Community Supervision, Housing Insecurity, & Homelessness.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 701(1), 152-171.
Augustine, D., Barragan, M., Chesnut, K., Pifer, N. A., Reiter, K., & Strong, J. D. (2021). “Window dressing: Possibilities and limitations of incremental changes in solitary confinement.” Health & Justice, 9(1), 1-13.
Sugie, N. F., Zatz, N. D., & Augustine, D. (2020). “Employer aversion to criminal records: An experimental study of mechanisms.” Criminology, 58(1), 5-34.
Reiter, K., Ventura, J., Lovell, D., Augustine, D., Barragan, M., Blair, T., Chesnut, K., Dashtgard, P., Gonzalez, G., & Strong, J. D. (2020). “Psychological distress in solitary confinement: Symptoms, severity, and prevalence in the United States, 2017–2018.” American Journal of Public Health, 110(S1), S56-S62.
Augustine, D. (2019). “Working around the law: Navigating legal barriers to employment during reentry.” Law & Social Inquiry, 44(3), 726-751.
