Criminologist honored for significant contributions to the discipline
For more than 30 years, Valerie Jenness has pushed criminology to confront uncomfortable truths — about hate, about prisons, about who gets protected by law and who gets left behind and harmed by law.
Now the field’s most prominent professional organization is formally recognizing her for it. The American Society of Criminology (ASC) has named Jenness, Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine, as one of its 2026 ASC Fellows — one of the highest honors the organization bestows upon scholars in the field.
The designation recognizes “scholarly contributions to criminology and distinction in the discipline,” as well as significant contributions to the career development of other criminologists and to organizational leadership within the ASC.
Jenness will be formally recognized at the ASC Annual Meeting Awards Plenary on Nov. 18 in Chicago.
Being recognized as a Fellow caps a distinguished career that has fundamentally reshaped criminological inquiry around issues of gender, sexuality, hate crime and the treatment of marginalized populations in the criminal justice system — and comes as Jenness prepares for retirement from UCI.
Her research has focused on prostitution, hate crime, prison violence, prisoner grievance systems and LGBTQ issues in criminal justice as well as law, policy, criminal justice reform, and gender and sexuality more generally.
“I believe in facts and theories,” she said last year while accepting the Paul Tappan Award from the Western Society of Criminology, invoking UCI’s motto. “Fiat lux — ‘let there be light’ — is my north star. It’s what I think the world needs more of, especially in these tumultuous times.”
Jenness, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from UC Santa Barbara, taught her first university course in 1987 and published her first article in 1990, both while still a graduate student. She joined the UCI faculty in 1997 and has remained there for nearly three decades, building an impactful career in contemporary criminology.
In that time, she has served as chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society (2001 to 2006), dean of the School of Social Ecology (2009-2015), Acting Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Institutional Research (2020-2021), and Chair of UCI’s Academic Senate (2024-2025).
A pioneer in criminological research
Jenness was nominated for the ASC Fellowship by Henry F. Fradella of Arizona State University, who described her career as exemplifying “a rare combination of theoretical innovation, empirical rigor, policy engagement, organizational leadership, and generative mentorship.”
In his nomination letter, Fradella credited Jenness with building the intellectual foundation for the study of violence against sexual and gender minorities at a time when the field had largely overlooked it.
One of her four books, Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement, along with a series of influential articles, traced how social movements, political institutions, and organizational actors interact to produce and implement hate crime legislation.
Fradella wrote that Jenness and her collaborators developed the concept of “law-in-between” — a framework now central to understanding how bias crime statutes are interpreted and enforced in practice.
“She moved the field beyond descriptive accounts of statutory reform by theorizing the processes through which law is translated into practice,” Fradella noted.
That body of work earned Jenness the Distinguished Scholar Award from the ASC's Division on Terrorism and Bias Crime in 2020.
Groundbreaking research on transgender incarceration
Jenness’s research on transgender people in carceral systems — work she began long before it attracted mainstream policy or media attention — has made a lasting impact in scholarly realms as well as public policy.
Combining demographic analysis, large-scale surveys, qualitative fieldwork, and institutional collaboration, she produced what Fradella described as “the most comprehensive body of criminological research on this population.”
Her 2019 article in Criminology, “Sexual Victimization Against Transgender Women in Prison: Consent and Coercion in Context,” was the first piece published in the ASC’s flagship journal to focus on transgender people in a sustained way.
One of her most recent publications, “Rethinking Sex-Segregated Incarceration: What Transgender Prisoners Want and Why It Matters,” centers the voices and preferences of incarcerated transgender individuals in broader debates among researchers, advocates and policymakers.
Her body of work on transgender incarceration earned Jenness the Distinguished Scholar Award from the ASC's Division on Corrections and Sentencing in 2021 and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the ASC’s Division of Women and Crime (later renamed the Division of Feminist Criminology) in 2020.
Her research has leaped out of academic journals and informed testimony before the California State Senate Committee on Public Safety, contributed to legislative discussions surrounding Assembly Bill 382 (the LGBT Prisoner Safety Act), and shaped correctional policy conversations around housing, surveillance, and implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Bringing research to bear on police and practice, Jenness has worked directly with the Los Angeles Police Department, the U.S. Courts for the 9th Circuit, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to develop and implement innovative policy, and she continues to serve as an expert in civil litigation related to conditions of confinement in correctional facilities. Her work was formally recognized by the LAPD and the State of California under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As the governor wrote in a commendation letter to Jenness, “California leads the nation in many things, most of them good…. That is why your hard work as a member of the Governor’s CDCR Rehabilitation Strike Team was so important to the public safety of all Californians and is deeply appreciated… We are using your guidance in establishing a continuum of programs that addresses the needs of inmates and parolees and helps them return to their communities as productive, positive citizens. CDCR will, at the same time, follow your specific recommendations in retraining staff to focus on rehabilitation rather than warehousing offenders.”
That is just one among many reasons she received the ASC’s Vollmer Award in 2019, which recognizes translational scholarship with real-world impact.
Beyond scholarship, Jenness has served as president of the American Society of Criminology, president of the Pacific Sociological Association, and president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She also served as co-editor of Contemporary Sociology and currently sits on the editorial committee of the Annual Review of Criminology.
Fradella emphasized Jenness’s extraordinary record of mentorship, noting that she has worked in an official capacity with over a hundred graduate students and postdoctoral scholars across institutions.
That mentorship has been recognized with the Peterson-Krivo Mentoring Award, presented jointly by the American Sociological Association’s Crime, Law, and Deviance Section and the Sociology of Law Section. She’s also twice received the President’s Award for contributions to the field of criminology and positive influence on the current WSC president’s career from the Western Society of Criminology.
Applauding Jenness’s mentoring and ongoing collaborative work, Fradella explained, “the deep impact of this work lies in the intellectual communities she has built and sustained. She has fostered collaborative research networks, co-authored extensively with junior scholars, and consistently used her professional stature to amplify emerging voices in the field.”
For Jenness, the recognition comes at a reflective moment.
As she prepares to retire from UCI, the ASC Fellow designation offers a capstone acknowledgment of a career spent pushing the discipline toward more inclusive and consequential questions.
“Being named an ASC Fellow is humbling in the deepest sense,” Jenness said. “I’ve spent my career trying to bring marginalized people — those most affected by law, by violence, and by the failures of institutions — into the center of criminological inquiry. If this work has helped move the field in that direction, and if it has helped open doors for the next generation of scholars, then that means more to me than any single award ever could. Whatever impact my work has had is surely a collective and intergenerational accomplishment made possible by mentors, students, collaborators, UCI, funding agencies, and policy sectors open to what social science has to offer.”
Fradella summed up his case plainly: “Dr. Jenness’s career embodies the scholarly distinction, institutional leadership, and generative mentorship that this designation is intended to recognize. Given her remarkable record of accomplishments in research, mentoring, and service, I am, quite honestly, surprised that Dr. Jenness is not already an ASC Fellow.”
That oversight has now been corrected.