Denver

I am an Associate Professor and Director of the Corrections & Reentry Lab in the School of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. My research interests include criminal record stigma, desistance, and how people evaluate positive credentials alongside criminal records.

I received my Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University at Albany and hold a MA and BA in Sociology and Criminal Justice from the University of Delaware. Before returning to graduate school, I was a research associate at the Urban Institute for three years, where I was involved in data collection, project management, and qualitative and quantitative data analysis.

My dissertation research was funded as a 2016-2017 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Graduate Research Fellow and I was awarded the University at Albany’s Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2018. I am a recipient of the 2019 Outstanding Young Experimental Criminologist Award (Academy of Experimental Criminology) and the 2021 Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award (American Society of Criminology).

Current Projects

Our team is currently analyzing interview data for 100 formerly incarcerated adults returning home to the Greater Boston area for the project Navigating Mainstream Institutions and Non-Traditional Alternatives Post-Incarceration (funded by the National Science Foundation).

  • Research team: Megan Denver (PI); Rod Brunson (co-PI, University of Maryland); Cassidy Pereira, Oscar Navarro, and Ayanna Miller (Northeastern PhD students); and several undergraduate and MS students.  Study partner: Office of Returning Citizens (Boston, MA).

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Edovo operates the nation’s most extensive secure tablet-based learning platform, delivering free educational, vocational, and rehabilitative programming to over one million incarcerated individuals across 1,100+ correctional facilities. In partnership with Edovo, our research team has a planning grant through Arnold Ventures to develop the research infrastructure for data integration, randomized interventions, and external data linkages. The ultimate goal is to examine the impact of tablet-based educational programming on improved outcomes and desistance signals for incarcerated individuals.

  • Research team: Megan Denver, Shawn Bushway (UAlbany/RAND), Audrey Hickert (University of Cincinnati), Lou Mariano (RAND)