Jayne Mooney

Jayne Mooney is Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and is on the doctoral faculties of women’s studies and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, NYC. Her focus of scholarship is on gender and crime, the history of crime and punishment, the sociology of violence, social deviance and critical criminology. She has extensive research experience and has published over thirty papers in books and peer-reviewed journals, together with numerous research monographs and reports. Her funded research has included local victimization surveys, violence against women, the policing of rape and sexual assault, studies of the Irish community in London, stops and frisk, video games and youth, street crime and the history of crime and criminal justice.  She developed one of the first large scale surveys of domestic violence in the UK (The North London Domestic Violence Survey), the findings of which continue to inform national and local government policy on domestic violence.  Her most recent publications are on the history of crime, including, for example,‘Rikers Island Jail Complex:  The Failure of a Model Penitentiary’ (with Jarrod Shanahan), Prison Journal; ‘New York City’s Captive Work Force:  Remembering the Prisoners who Built Rikers Island’ (with Jarrod Shanahan), International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 2018; ‘A Tale of Two Regicides’ for The European Journal of Criminology, 2014 (this was a special issue to launch the European Society of Criminology’s working group on history), and the book Theoretical Foundations of Criminology: Place, Time and Context  (Routledge, 2019), which presents the core theories of criminology as historical and cultural products and theorists as producers of culture, writing in particular historical moments. The Theoretical Foundations is a development of the themes explored in Fifty Key Thinkers in Criminology (jointly edited with K.Hayward and S. Maruna, Routledge, 2011). Jayne is also the author (with Yolanda Ortiz-Rodriguez) of  "¿Que dirán? Making sense of the impact of Latinas’ experiences of intimate partner violence in New York City", and the book Gender, Violence and the Social Order (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, Palgrave reprint, 2011). She is a member of the Howard League for Penal Reform in the UK, SOLON (based at Plymouth University, UK) and the British Society of Criminology's Historical Network.  She is Co-Editor in Chief of  Critical Criminology: An International Journal (an official journal of the ASC),  Vice-Chair of the Critical Criminology and Social Justice Division of the American Society of Criminology (having served twice previously as an executive officer) and is currently the Division’s official archivist. She was European book review editor for the journal Critical Criminology. She is a board member of the British Journal of Criminology, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy and for Current Issues in Criminal Justice.  Jayne is a senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice.  Recently, she was honored with the appointment of honorary professor at Queensland University of Technology, Dept. of Law, Brisbane, Australia. 

Jayne is originally from the UK, where she held several senior faculty appointments at the University of Kent, Middlesex University, the Open University and Birkbeck College University of London.  She worked for a number of years as a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Criminology, Middlesex University. In the UK she was an advisor to the Home Office, the London Boroughs of Islington and Hackney and the Metropolitan Police on domestic violence; Women Against Rape, the Zero Tolerance campaign against male violence, Safer Cities, and Holloway Women’s Prison.  She also served as policing consultant to the UK Government’s Irish in Britain All-Parliamentary Group and was a consultant to the International Centre:  Researching Child Sexual Exploitation, Violence and Trafficking, University of Bedfordshire. She has taken part in several radio debates on violence against women, including BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.  She serves as a member of the Fulbright Awards Screening Committee, Institute of International Education, United States Department of State.   

Jayne is currently involved in four research projects: the first is a social history of Rikers Island and the penitentiaries and jails of NYC - going back to the origins of the city, the second is on undocumented women, domestic violence and fears of deportation, the third is on historical texts in relation to critical criminology, and the fourth is on women's green victimization and its relevance to debates on violence against women and feminicide.  She is Co- Director of the Social Change and Transgressive Studies Project, CUNY and a co-director of the Social Anatomy of a Deportation Regime Project (women and deportation) and the Critical Social History Project.  She is completing her fourth book Rikers: A Social History of the Other New York City for Temple University Press and a second edition of Theoretical Foundations of Criminology: Place, Time and Context.

In Oct. 2020 Jayne received the Life Time Achievement Award from the Critical Criminology and Social Justice Division of the American Society of Criminology and in 2021 John Jay College of Criminal Justice's Scholarly Excellence Award.