Crime and Violence Prevention
Centers and Institutes
Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict
Director: Jack Levin, Irving and Betty Brudnick Professor of Sociology
Founded with an $800,000 gift from alumnus Irving Brudnick and his wife Betty Brudnick, the Center seeks to reduce conflict and violence between individuals and groups in a variety of areas including: school violence, terrorism, hate crimes, international conflict and warfare, hate speech on campus, religious persecution, and organized hate groups. With six faculty and researchers from psychology, sociology, criminal justice, law, and political science, the Center sponsors conferences, panel discussions, courses, and research projects. The Center’s members have written or contributed chapters to more than 30 books. Each year, faculty teach a course in which students complete a community service project that entails learning about social conflict and exploring solutions to it. In 2005, the Center hosted the Second International Conference on Hate Crimes. Founded in 1998.
Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research
Director: Jack McDevitt. Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, College of Criminal Justice
Uses research to assist government agencies, educational institutions and members of the private sector with the development, enhancement and implementation of contemporary criminal justice policies and issues. The Center’s six criminal justice faculty and research associates wrote a report released by President Clinton in 2000 that recommended ways to improve the reporting of hate crimes nationally; worked on a project to increase the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ ability to trace guns used in serious crimes; and collaborated with the FBI and the Boston Police to identify the impact of hate crimes. The Center has received significant funding from the U.S. Justice Department, Joyce Foundation and City of Boston. Founded in 1997.
Domestic Violence Institute (DVI)
Executive Director: Lois Kanter, School of Law Senior Clinical Specialist
A nationally recognized education, service and research organization based in the School of Law that combats domestic violence by providing legal advocacy services to battered women and training lawyers and other professionals to work effectively with victims of abuse. DVI provides clinical training opportunities for law students who can participate in an intensive abuse prevention clinic at Dorchester District Court or interview women patients in the Boston Medical Center's Emergency Department and provide them with appropriate violence prevention services. DVI is a founding partner of the Dorchester Community Roundtable, a national demonstration project funded with a $1.4 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It seeks to strengthen advocacy services to battered women; sponsor new programs to assist children who witness violence in their homes; create education and intervention programs directed toward teen dating violence; and identify effective strategies for intervening with perpetrators. Its success led the Department of Justice to award Dorchester a $9 million, five-year grant to create a model Domestic Violence Court; Northeastern faculty serve on the court’s advisory board and supervise its Civil Advocacy Office.
With the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts, DVI has developed a Family Law Network that supports attorneys who represent battered women in complex child custody, support and visitation cases. This network, developed with funding from the Soros Foundation, links the law school with family law practitioners and battered women through an interactive Web site that provides comprehensive online legal resources. In addition, Northeastern faculty teach a Family Law Litigation seminar on the challenges that battered women face in family law courts. A post-graduate fellowship program offers new lawyers the opportunity to participate in DVI’s work and train as domestic violence advocates and clinical researchers. Founded in 1993.
Directors: Jack McDevitt, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, College of Criminal Justice
This interdisciplinary research institute combines faculty and professional staff from the College of Criminal Justice, the School of Law and the College of Arts and Sciences. At the forefront of the national dialogue about race and social policy, the Institute engages in research that examines the influence of race on important questions of social justice and the structural causes of racial injustice. The Institute’s six faculty and research associates from criminal justice, law, sociology and anthropology, education, and African-American studies focus on understanding the connections among individual bias, institutional policies and disparate treatment in the criminal justice and education systems. Research areas include racial disparities in criminal sentencing, jury selection, and school expulsions; urban school safety and discipline; racial profiling; and hate crimes. The Institute has developed a community advisory board whose 15 members have public policy expertise in criminal justice and education; this board assists in developing a significant social justice research agenda and incorporates community perspective in the research process. The Institute has received funding from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety to be the academic institution to conduct its statewide racial profiling data analysis; the Attorney General of Rhode Island, to conduct an analysis of Rhode Island traffic stop data; Providence Police Department, to conduct a racial profiling analysis for the city of Providence. Founded in 2001.