McNair Scholar 2017Santino Reynolds
Santino Reynolds was born in St Paul, MN. He volunteered for the armed service and served in the United States Marine Corps from 2008 until 2013. Upon completion of his contractual service, Santino began his attendance at the University of Minnesota in 2013 and hopes to complete his B.A. in Sociology: Law, Crime, and Deviance in the spring of 2018. Mr. Reynolds plans on getting his PhD in Criminology.
My dream is to be accepted into a prestigious PhD Criminology program and become a researcher developing and analyzing new policy in the War on Drugs.”
Research project
Police Reform in the Progressive City
Abstract: Since the highly publicized deaths of young black males at the hands of police, to include, but not limited to, Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Freddie Grey and Michael Brown, the idea of police reform has become a highly volatile topic. With it, came the rise of Black Lives Matter, as well as other social justice movements, to help bring attention to, and curb the loss of young black lives at the hands of law enforcement. Superficially, the sanctity of life is a concern to all parties involved. What is generally unknown, and often overlooked, is how the idea of police reform can diverge amongst the different agonistic perspectives between Law Enforcement, Reform Advocacy Groups, and the Communities themselves that these groups are said to be serving. Using textual evidence, interviews with invested community members, as well as public information posted on different media outlets, I examined the different connotations of police reform as it pertains to the North Minneapolis Neighborhood, and the citizens, reform organizations, and police force who live and work there.
Faculty profile
Dr. Michelle Phelps was raised in Orange County, California. Throughout high school, academic excellence always came easy to her. She attended her undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley and received a B.A. in Psychology. Due to her own stable upbringing as well as her academic prowess, she saw graduate school more as a personal responsibility to achieve her full human potential. Having her choice of top accredited universities, Dr. Phelps sided with Princeton’s PhD program in Sociology and Social Policy, due to its status as one of the best colleges in the nation. Her research includes the sociology of punishment, focusing in particular on the punitive turn in the U.S. Her current work focuses on the rise of probation supervision as a criminal justice sanction and its relationship to mass incarceration. She has also examined a variety of criminal justice topics, including changes in rehabilitative programming in U.S. prisons since the 1970s and the recent decarceration trend and its implications for inequality.