Alexes Harris

The lecture will be Thursday, April 19. A reception will be held at 5 p.m. in the Odegaard Undergraduate Library, room 220, followed by the lecture at 6:30 p.m. in Kane Hall, room 110.

The event will be held in conjunction with Husky Fest.

Harris’ lecture will focus on her research investigating the use of monetary sanctions or legal financial obligations as part of criminal sentences in the United States. She is currently developing a book manuscript on the topic.

Harris was recently recognized by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education as one of the magazine’s top “Under 40” scholars. In 2009, she was featured as one of Viewpoints Magazine’s top 40 emerging leaders from diverse communities under the age of 40.

The Kelly lectures, inaugurated in 2005, are named in honor of the UW’s first vice president for the Office of Minority Affairs, and dedicated to acknowledging the work of distinguished faculty by spotlighting nationally recognized research focusing on diversity and social justice.

The lecture is free and open to the public but registration is suggested; contact cpromad@uw.edu or call 206-685-9594 by April 12.

"Websites that list sex offenders may make it seem that there are a lot of them living among us. It makes it hard for the public to discern risk," said Alissa Ackerman, assistant professor of social work at the University of Washington Tacoma. Improving the accuracy of sex-offender registries also means "better use of law-enforcement resources to watch the people who actually need to be watched," she said.

Ackerman is lead author of a study examining sex offender counts compiled by Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York and Texas – states with large sex-offender registries. She obtained the counts from last year's state records, which are available to the public.

Ackerman discovered that the registries include people who are not actually living within the community, such as individuals who have died, been deported, are in jail or have moved out of state. Across the five states in the study, she found that only 43 percent, or 114,690 out of 201,135 sex offenders listed, were actually living in the communities designated by the registries.

By state, Ackerman found:

-          Florida had the greatest discrepancy, reporting 56,784 sex offenders when only 22,877 – a 60 percent difference – were living in Florida communities.

-          New York, at 52 percent, had the second-highest discrepancy, listing 32,930 offenders in the registry with just 15,950 living in the community.

-          Illinois had a 48 percent difference, with 25,088 registered offenders and 13,066 actually residing in the community.

-          Georgia had a 36 percent difference, 20,212 listed on the registry and 7,201 living in the community.

-          At 25 percent, Texas had the lowest discrepancy, with 49,786 actual residents from the 66,121 sex offenders listed.

The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Crime and Justice.

States differ in data collection and reporting procedures, and that can lead to inflated numbers and make it difficult for the public to distinguish the level of risk, Ackerman said. For instance, states vary in whether they include all levels of sex offenders. New York lists only levels 2 and 3, the offenders most likely to commit sexual crimes again. Florida, on the other hand, lists all offenders regardless of risk level.

"Registries are helpful if they are properly and accurately maintained and include only those individuals living in the community," Ackerman said. "Then we are able to discern risk in our communities and the public can be better aware of offenders living near them."

She added that more than 90 percent of victims know their offender, and listed family members, stepparents, close friends and acquaintances as common perpetrators. "We look at strangers on the sex offender registry websites, but it's really the people who we know who we need to worry about."

Co-authors of the study are Jill Levenson of Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., and Andrew Harris of the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

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For more information, contact Ackerman at 253-692-4373 or ackerma1@uw.edu.

When all low-income households in the Puget Sound region are considered, not just ones using the 520 bridge, a household earning $15,600 a year would pay an average of $10.50 or 0.07 percent of its annual income in tolls, compared with $63 or 0.08 percent for a household earning $76,350. This means that a toll on the bridge would be distributed roughly proportional to income across all households in the region.

State Road 520 crossing Lake Washington to the Eastside on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge

Lucia Sanchez

“When examined this way,” said Robert Plotnick, a professor at the UW Evans School of Public Affairs who led the research, “tolling the 520 bridge does not create disproportionate burdens on low-income residents and is less burdensome than other ways of financing road construction such as gas or sales taxes, which would affect all low-income households and be regressive.”

However, low-income users of the 520 bridge will pay a greater percentage of their income than higher-income users. For example, the peak toll of $3.50 on the 520 bridge would mean that a household earning $15,600 annually (median for low-income households) would pay $1,680, or almost 11 percent of its income for tolls each year if its commute includes the 520 bridge during peak hours. That $1,680 would represent only 2.2 percent of income for a household earning $76,350 (median for non-low-income households).

Plotnick and his colleagues studied how tolls on heavily-used segments of the six major highways in the Puget Sound region (I-5, 405, I-90, State Road 520, State Road 167 and State Road 99) would affect both low-income and higher-income households. They found that tolls would cost low-income drivers a greater percentage of their income than higher-income ones. Low-income drivers would wind up spending almost four times more of their income than wealthier ones.

This would be a regressive situation in that the tolls would place a greater financial burden on poorer drivers than wealthier ones.

But the researchers also found that the extent of regressivity in tolling depends on whether the impacts are examined only across users of tolled roads or across all low-income households.

If toll costs were spread across all households in the Puget Sound region, not just the 1 percent of low-income households and 5 percent of higher-income ones who use the 520 bridge, the financial burden on low-income households would not be disproportionate.

The study results appear in the February issue of the Journal of Urban Affairs. Plotnick and his colleagues examined car ownership and transportation patterns among low-income and higher-income households. They used data from the Puget Sound metropolitan region and geographic information system methods to map driving routes back and forth to work.

To the researchers’ knowledge, it’s the first time geographic information systems methods have been used to map commuter routes in order to model tolling schemes. The study also provided insight on how equity effects differ within income groups as well as between them.

The Washington State Department of Transportation will begin tolls on the State Road 520 bridge this summer. Tolls will vary by time of day and range from $1.10 to $3.50 with Good To Go accounts. Tolls billed by mail are expected to cost an additional $1.50. From 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., travel on the bridge will be free.

The money will help pay for the new bridge, which crosses Lake Washington, connecting Seattle and Bellevue.

Besides Plotnick, authors of the paper are Jennifer Romich, an associate professor at the UW School of Social Work; Jennifer Thacker, a staff member at the nonprofit Burst for Prosperity; and Matthew Dunbar, a specialist in geographic information systems at the UW Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.

The research was funded by the Washington State Department of Transportation.

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For more information, contact Plotnick at 206-685-2055 (o) or 206-930-5111 (cell) or Plotnick@uw.edu.

A six-member panel moderated by Mary D. Fan, UW assistant professor of law, will explore these issues and related ones from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 24, in 119 William H. Gates Hall.

“Racial Disparity and the Criminal Justice System” will be presented by the UW Minority Law Students Association. Members of the panel will be:

• Veronica Alicea-Galvan, judge of the Des Moines, Wash. Municipal Court.

• Katherine Beckett, UW sociology professor with a joint appointment in the Law, Societies and Justice Program.

• Jeff Geoghagan, an officer on the Seattle Police Department SWAT team.

• Alexes Harris, UW assistant professor of sociology.

• Anita Khandelwal, a staff attorney at The Defender Association in Seattle.

• Mark Larson, chief criminal deputy, King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

For more information, contact Michael Kim, president of the Minority Law Students Association, at mdkim85@uw.edu or 818-219-6850.

Suazo had been traveling on a Bonderman Fellowship when she contracted an illness and died in Guatemala on Feb. 9. Suazo was two days short of her 31^st birthday.

Alena Suazo

She had planned to become a public defender, mainly because she’d been on the other side of the table and knew what it looks like. She wanted to help people who had felt as powerless and troubled as she had.

For seven years as a teenager in Camarillo, Calif., Suazo belonged to a street gang. Drugs, alcohol and petty crime were routine parts of her life. She also served time in jail after a theft conviction.

Her parents eventually decided Camarillo was the wrong place to be. They moved to Billings, Mont., and after Suazo went with them she decided she didn’t want to be ashamed of her background on the streets – so she headed to college.

In an interview with University Week last June, Suazo said that when she first thought about law school, she didn’t even know a lawyer and certainly didn’t know what law school would be like. “I just knew,” she said, “that a person could do so much with a law degree. I believed I could use it to make positive change.”

And by Suazo’s own admission, her first days at UW School of Law were a shock. Things like middle-class paychecks simply hadn’t been part of her world. She recalled, “I felt like an imposter.”

But then determination kicked in. Suazo eventually served on the UW Law School Diversity Committee and co-chaired the Latina/o Law Students Association. She worked in UW Student Legal Services and the Tribal Law Defense Clinic.

As a Bonderman fellow, Suazo received $20,000 for approximately nine months of independent travel. She had been exploring cultures that had been colonized, aiming to learn how they regained independence.

Suazo often gestured with her hands. Pointing toward herself, she once said, “I’ve been fortunate — or unfortunate —  to have had the experience of having to have a public defender.”

Suazo wanted to help others who found themselves in similar need. Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large also wrote a column remembering Suazo.

A new book, "Jobs That Matter: Find a Stable, Fulfilling Career in Public Service," (JIST Publishing, $14.95) shows how to launch a career that not only changes the world but provides steady paychecks.

The author, Heather Krasna, 37, has been a career counselor for 12 years. She's now director of career services at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

The book appears at a time when millions of Americans are looking for public service jobs fresh out of school, seeking new careers in public service because of layoffs or changing careers to follow their dreams. The book also appears as some 270,000 baby boomers, some of whom were inspired by President John F. Kennedy, are nearing retirement from federal jobs, and as the Obama administration encourages young people to consider careers in public service. To encourage young people to consider public service, the federal Office of Personnel management has created a "coolness" task force.

Noting the need for a how-to on public service careers, Krasna wrote "Jobs that Matter" in only four months.

JIST Publishing

"I wrote at night, on the bus, on the weekends," she said. "I was surprised I was able to pull off the writing in a short period of time."

The book came together quickly, she said, because much information was already in her head, the result of years as a career adviser and employer relations specialist plus experience in an array of internships and volunteer jobs in public service.

Daughter of a political science professor and an English professor in Michigan, Krasna received a master's degree in nonprofit management from Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy in New York City. She specializes in distilling information and making human connections -- what it takes, Krasna said, to land a job in public service.

The initial chapter of "Jobs that Matter" takes readers through a series of exercises: defining career dreams, choosing career missions such as children's issues or civil rights, targeting job functions such as urban planning, and deciding work values such as prestige, level of responsibility and tolerance of stress.

The subsequent eight chapters resulted from extensive research. Krasna studied hundreds of jobs listed in the Occupational Outlook Handbook compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor. She studied scores of organizations that hire public service professionals. She used LinkedIn, GovLoop, Twitter, Facebook and referrals from colleagues and friends to find and interview dozens of people in public service jobs.

Heather Krasna -- UW Photo

Thematically organized around job types, the chapters range from human services and health to protecting the environment and managing financial resources. They also include 26 profiles of public service professionals. In "Keeping People Safe," for example, Krasna profiles Ronald S. Neubauer, executive director of the Eastern Missouri Law Enforcement Training Center, who began his career with a military police unit in Vietnam.

Krasna also offers tips for landing jobs at specific places, such as the United Nations. (The U.N. is really tough: "Because of its relatively high pay and excellent benefits," Krasna writes, "the United Nations is extremely competitive, and hiring can sometimes be limited for U.S. citizens.")

The last three chapters of "Jobs That Matter" focus on the job search itself: developing a resume, networking, navigating the application process, interviewing, negotiating offers and getting promoted.

Krasna takes pains with details. For bullet points of a resume, she urges job seekers to quantify their experience in a certain formula. It results in such lines as, "Effectively tutored up to 20 students per month, greatly improving their test scores." Krasna also offers guidance about essays necessary for some federal work and tips about negotiating salaries for public service jobs.