About Your Instructor

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Elaine Gunnison, Ph.D.

Professor/Graduate Director

Department of Criminal Justice, Criminology & Forensics

Seattle University

gunnisone@seattleu.edu

(206) 296-2430


About Me

Dr. Gunnison received her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati in 2001 with a specialization in life course criminology, female offending, and corrections.  Her research interests include understanding female offending patterns such as desistance and persistence, the applicability of criminological theory to females, understanding community corrections officers, and ex-offender reentry. She has also recently been examining criminal justice researchers’ experiences with IRBs. Her research has been published in Crime and Delinquency, Criminal Justice Studies: A Critical Journal of Crime, Law, and Society, Federal Probation, The Journal of Criminal Justice, The Journal of Community Corrections, The Journal of International and Comparative Criminal Justice, The Journal of Crime and Justice, Women and Criminal Justice, Corrections:  Policy, Practice, and Research, The Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice & Criminology, The Journal of Prison Education and Reentry, The Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, The Journal of Interpersonal Violence, The Western Criminology Review, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, The Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, Academic Exchange Quarterly, the Qualitative Report, the Encyclopedia of Community Corrections, the Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, the Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory, the Encyclopedia of Street Crime, Multimedia Encyclopedia of Women in Today’s World, the Encyclopedia of Crimes of the Century, and the Encyclopedia of Juvenile Delinquency. She has conducted primary research in a variety of corrections’ spaces (e.g., prisons, day reporting centers) and secondary research examining life course criminology and in corrections on the topic of work release centers. She has published several books including “Offender Reentry:  Beyond Crime and Punishment” (2013, with Jacqueline B. Helfgott) for Lynne Rienner PublishersLinks to an external site.; “Women and Crime:  Balancing the Scales” (2016, with Fran Bernat and Lynne Goodstein) for Wiley-Blackwell PublishersLinks to an external site.; “Community Corrections” (2017) for Carolina Academic Press Links to an external site.; and “Women Leading Justice:  Experiences and Insights” (2019 with Jacqueline B. Helfgott) for RoutledgeLinks to an external site..  She has served as co-principal investigator on several collaborative academic-practitioner research initiatives including an evaluation of the Seattle Women’s IF Reentry Project and the South King County Pretrial Assessment and Linkage Services (PALS) Program. She also has served on the Seattle Work Release Advisory Board.  She recently finished a six-year term as Co-Editor (with Jacqueline B. Helfgott) of Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & SocietyLinks to an external site. In 2023, she was elected as Vice-President of the Western Society of Criminology. She is a member of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the American Society of Criminology, and the Western Society of Criminology. She has served as graduate director of the criminal justice Master’s program since 2008 (with the exception of 2010-2011, 2017-2018).