Projects
UAPP (2016 – ongoing)
Prisons provide unique insights into how society treats its most disadvantaged members,
including those marginalized by Indigeneity, race, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, social class, substance misuse, etc. Until recently, however, Canada lacked an extensive body of empirical research on the lived reality of prisons and re-entry experiences post-prison.
In 2016 I signed research agreements with provincial and federal correctional ministries, to initiate the University of Alberta Prison Project. I have been the director since its inception.
In 2016, the core team consisted of an expert on justice institutions (Kevin Haggerty), a PhD student interested in Indigenous prison programming (Justin Tetrault), a Ph.D. student addressing victimization (Luca Berardi), and a PhD student who had previously worked as a correctional officer (William Schultz). All of the former student team members are now assistant professors. With this core team and 41 additional trainees, this research project quickly became one of the world’s most extensive, mixed-methods studies of the lived experiences of incarcerated individuals and those working in prisons.
This multi-year study now encompasses more than 900 interviews and surveys and its work is reflected in more than 25 publications to date. The UAPP was also finalist of the SSHRC Impact Awards in 2023 and in 2024 – Talent Category
The work sheds light on the intricate relationships between social dynamics, gender, race, drugs, violence, victimization experiences, and radicalization within Canadian correctional facilities. The UAPP has developed several research goals: (1) compiling the first systematic baseline data about the realities of the victim-offender overlap for persons held in Canadian prisons to encourage the implementation of trauma-informed programming; (2) building an empirical understanding of the consequences of the drug poisoning crisis on prison life, creating a knowledge base of best practices and advocating for harm reduction measures; and (3) examining whether different forms of radicalization can germinate in prison. The study also illuminates how Indigenous people – who are grossly overrepresented in Canada’s criminal justice system (CJS) – navigate prison in the context of Canada’s colonial history.
The findings have spurred my team and I to undertake additional collaborative research and have laid the foundations for a landmark study on re-entry to society – see re-entry project..
Findings from the UAPP are published in Criminology, Crime and Justice, Sociology, Punishment and Society, the British Journal of Criminology, Incarceration and others
SSHRC Partnership Grant (2022 – 29)
In the past two years, North America's Criminal Justice Systems (CJSs) have received a level of public scrutiny and condemnation not seen since the height of the civil rights movement over a half-century ago. Shocking incidents have made front-page news out of long-simmering concerns about police violence, pains of imprisonment, gendered and racial victimization, and the denial of fundamental civil liberties.
The Intersecting Institutions of Criminal Justice and Injustice SSHRC Partnership Grant (PG) facilitates a series of related empirical, theoretically-informed, and policy-relevant research projects on the relationship between the CJS and the marginalization of individuals from some of Canada's most vulnerable communities. In part, this PG's significance derives from the enormous consequences that can follow for vulnerable people when they encounter the CJS. Three main questions inform the research:
To what extent do systemic barriers within the justice system perpetuate forms of marginalization for particular subsets of the Canadian population?
In what specific ways do existing policy responses and instruments at each stage of the criminal justice process require systematic reform?
What evidence-based recommendations can help address these critical issues (1-2 above)?
We bring together an impressive and diverse selection of established, mid-level, and emerging criminology scholars in a partnership with the United Way (UW). This is an ideal partnership. The UW is the largest non-governmental funder of social services in Canada and has decades of experience translating research findings into community-based interventions. We have also partnered with a number of other stakeholder organizations, such as Legal Aid Ontario, the John Howard Society, and the Edmonton Police Service to only name a few.
While I direct the PG, I am joined by my colleagues Philipp Badawy (University of Alberta), Luca Berardi (McMaster University), Jana Grekul (University of Alberta), Kevin Haggerty (University of Alberta), Brian Johnson (University of Maryland), Nicole Myers (Queens University), Marianne Quirouette (UMontreal), Kanika Samuels (Ontario Tech), Justin Tetrault (University of Alberta - Augustana) Scot Wortley (University of Toronto).
Our research focuses on four criminal justice 'nodes' (policing, courts, prison, and reintegration), studying the dynamics internal to each node as they relate to processes of marginalization but also developing an understanding of cross-organizational dynamics and forms of cumulative disadvantage in the CJS.
We are running calls for proposals several times throughout the tenure of the partnership grant – so junior scholars and students, watch out for the funding calls! We just held a summer academy for Canadian graduate students as well.
Re-entry Study (2024 – ongoing)
I am directing a large-scale, longitudinal project examining the factors contributing to the successes/barriers of community re-entry among people released from provincial prisons (remand and sentenced) in Alberta – acknowledging that provincial prisoners account for most people released and reintegrating across the country. My team and I are aiming for a randomized sample of 33% of the currently incarcerated people in our provincial prison population (approximately 1250 people).
We currently lack a systematic understanding of the unique challenges for re-entry related to factors such as social connections, employment, race, housing, health, and other domains that have been studied in other countries. This leaves Canadian scholars, ministries, and policy makers in a situation where evidence-based suggestions about the services needed to support successful re-entry and disrupt recidivism cannot be made. Our knowledge about re-entry is largely based on studies conducted in the US and Europe. The findings from these studies are not easily transferrable to the Canadian context or suitable for understanding how people in Alberta specifically experience re-entry and recidivism.
Our study, the first of its kind in Canada, examines the following questions in the Albertan context:
What barriers do incarcerated people anticipate when re-entering society and how do these differ across different populations?
What programs/services/factors do incarcerated people anticipate being helpful/beneficial during their re-entry and how do these differ across different populations?
How do the factors participants have identified during their baseline interview/survey in prison change during their actual experience during their first year of re-entry?
We use a mixed-methods approach to examine the barriers to successful reintegration, and conversely, the aspects that contribute to successful re-entry among provincially incarcerated / released men and women in Alberta. We follow a longitudinal design, with the first baseline survey/interview being conducted in prison (on release day) and follow-up surveys/interviews being conducted in the community post-release (about 2 weeks post release, 2 months post release, 4 months post release, 6 months post release, and one year post release). This design allows us to capture a person’s re-entry experience for the first-year post prison and matches the design of the most prominent international studies.
Unwanted (+Ethnographies)
An ethnographer at heart, my first major research project was a five-year long ethnography with 55 second-generation male Muslim drug dealers in Frankfurt, Germany. This work won the second prize of the Koerber Studienpreis – the highest award for doctoral dissertations in Germany. I later turned my Ph.D. dissertation into a book published with Oxford University Press.
Unwanted: Muslim Immigrants, Dignity, and Drug Dealing (2014) examines an issue of critical ongoing relevance: the integration of Muslim immigrants in Western societies. Building on five years of intensive ethnographic research, Unwanted provides unprecedented insights into the relationship among immigration, social exclusion, and the informal economy. Having spent countless hours with these young men, hanging out in the streets, in cafes or bars and at the local community center, Unwanted explores the intimate aspects of their, one of the most discriminated and excluded populations in Germany. I look at how the young men negotiate their participation in the drug market while still trying to adhere to their cultural and religious obligations and how they struggle to find a place within German society. The young men considered their involvement in the drug trade a response to their exclusion at the same time that it provides a means of forging an identity and a place within German society. It is extremely rare for women to conduct in-depth crime ethnographies, making this ethnography stand out in the field. In particular, where street culture is often defined by extreme levels of machismo, being a woman allowed me to move past this stereotype to outline how issues of family, marriage, and neighborhood fit into the dynamics of drug dealing. Within a year of its publication, the book was highly lauded in reviews published in eight major peer-reviewed journals and was featured in an author-meets-critic session at the American Society of Criminology meeting in 2014.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/unwanted-9780199856473?cc=ca&lang=en&
I am still in contact with several of my participants from “way back when” and remain passionate about ethnographic work. I have written about my experiences as a “trusted outsider” in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0891241613497747 and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0891241618785225
and have also edited a handbook on Crime Ethnography (see handbooks).
Additional Projects
Risk and Resilience to Radicalization
In my ethnographic work in Germany, the young men I studied found an “alternative place of belonging” in the drug market. While the drug market (or the informal economy, more broadly) is certainly one place in which marginalized second-generation immigrants often find a sense of belonging, more recently, greater attention has been paid to the role of radical groups as “alternate places of belonging” for marginalized populations.
Building on my previous research in Germany, I started a new research program on radicalization carried out in collaboration with Dr. Sara Thompson (Toronto Metropolitan University) in the Somali and Tamil diasporas in Canada. In this project, we examined how second-generation Somali and Tamil immigrants support, oppose, or remain neutral to al-Shabaab and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), respectively. In this project, we a) identified the processes by which actors join or support terrorist organizations, thereby paying particular attention to community-specific differences; b) examined the factors that render people resilient to supporting and joining terrorist organizations; and c) analysed the relationships between the police and ethnic communities that have been labeled as “suspect communities. We published several articles on this strand of research, including a piece in the British Journal of Criminology (Joosse, Bucerius, and Thompson 2015), a piece in Terrorism and Political Violence (Thompson and Bucerius 2018), an article in Ethnic and Racial Studies (Karimi, Bucerius and Thompson 2018), a book chapter (Thompson and Bucerius 2019), Ethnic and Racial Studies (Karimi, Bucerius and Thompson 2023) a piece in Qualitative Sociology (Bucerius, Thompson, Dunford 2022) and lastly, one in Sociology (Karimi, Thompson and Bucerius 2024). Dr. Thompson and I have produced a number of reports for government organizations (see CV).
In a piece published in Terrorism and Political Violence (Haggerty and Bucerius 2018), I have also contributed to the theoretical discussion about radicalization and made the argument that there are many parallels in the process of becoming a soldier and become a radical that would be best understood with the concept of martialization.
As part of the University of Alberta Prison Project, I have also written on how incarcerated people and correctional officers think about radicalization in the prison context, what mechanisms are in place to inhibit recruitment to radical groups and why radicalization is not a concern in the context of Canadian prisons. These works are published in Criminology (Bucerius, Schultz and Haggerty 2023), Crime, Law and Deviance (Schultz, Bucerius, Haggerty 2020) as well as in Criminal Justice and Behaviour (Schultz, Bucerius, Haggerty 2021)
As a result of my research on radicalization, I was invited to serve on the executive board of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security, and Society (TSAS).
Neighbourhood Restructuring (2015-2017)
Some of Canada’s most socially and economically marginalized populations reside in social housing across the country. Concerns about high concentrations of poverty, social isolation, and neighbourhood safety have made these developments the target of various policy interventions over the years. Built in the 1950s, Toronto’s Regent Park is Canada’s oldest and largest social housing development. It has reached national fame by being one of the country’s most disadvantaged communities and has long been associated with high rates of crime and violence. In the spring of 2011, my collaborator Dr. Sara Thompson and I launched a pilot study (to clarify what individual- and neighbourhood-level factors might buffer young adults in Regent Park from criminal victimization and offending.
The young adults we spoke with (15 women and 15 men aged 18–25) consistently reported that their social networks, which were largely embedded in Regent Park, and the tight-knit nature of the community offer protection against involvement in gang- and drug-related activities. Another consistent theme was that the latest policy intervention in Regent may be exacerbating existing problems for youth and/or creating new ones.
This policy aim ed to ‘revitalize’ Regent Park by transforming it into a socio-economically mixed neighbourhood. But the mass displacement of residents across Toronto as their homes are literally razed and rebuilt during the process, as well as the influx of middle class home owners into the neighbourhood that was once 100% social housing undermined the very social networks and sense of community that youth reported kept them ‘out of trouble.’ Because our pilot data suggested that the revitalization has had many unintended consequences for the youth we interviewed, we started to empirically examine whether these and other consequences exist on a larger scale or persist over time. These works are published in the British Journal of Criminology (2013 and 2017) and City and Community (2017).
Loved Ones of Incarcerated People and the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020-2023)
As part of the University of Alberta Prison Project (UAPP), this study examined the experiences of people during the COVID 19 pandemic who have incarcerated loved ones in prison. We conducted 181 longitudinal interviews from 2020 to 2021 with 29 loved ones across Canada to identify some of their most common concerns about COVID-related developments. We also asked about how participants navigated their relationships with loved ones during the pandemic. Our team interviewed each participant every two to four weeks thereafter for the next ten months, depending on their availability. Participants completed an average of six interviews each. Interviews ceased in January 2021, although we continue to be in contact with several of our participants. Results are published in the British Journal of Criminology (2023).
Policing the Drug Poisoning Crisis (2019-2022)
Our findings about how the drug poisoning crisis has changed dynamics inside prisons has sparked my collaborators and my interest in examining its effects on the criminal justice system more broadly. As such, Dr. Krahn, Dr. Haggerty (both UofA), Dr. Berardi (McMaster University) and I carried out a mixed method study involving the Edmonton and Calgary Police Services to better understand the physical and psychological effects that the fentanyl crisis may be having on police officers. We assessed how aware police officers are of opioid-related training and the emergency services available to them, and gauged how officers believe those services might be improved. We published these findings in Social Science and Medicine (2021) Policing and Society (2022), Kriminologisches Journal (2023) the British Journal of Criminology (2024) We also prepared a final report for the police service (Bucerius, Berardi, Haggerty and Krahn 2019)