Leah Jacobs

Dr. Jacobs’ scholarship is at the intersection of social welfare, criminal legal, and community mental health policy and intervention. She breaks with analytic tradition that situates crime and disorder as products of either individual pathology or sociostructural forces and that siloes social welfare policy and intervention from criminal legal policy and intervention. Instead, she thinks about problems of crime and disorder as products of the interaction between social structure and individual circumstance and as relevant to social welfare and criminal legal systems. Her empirical work has investigated the role of neighborhood contexts, homelessness, community mental health services, and individual-level criminal risk factors in shaping outcomes for legal system-involved people. She is currently conducting two experiments to test interventions that seek to prevent criminal legal system involvement by reducing negative interactions between police and youth and by building collective efficacy to intervene in community conflict.

Dr. Jacobs is also a former case manager, program planner and evaluator, and community organizer. She holds a BS in Psychology from Northeastern University, a dual MA in Policy and Planning and Child Development from Tufts University, and an MSW and PhD in Social Welfare from the University of California- Berkeley. 

Dr. Jacobs welcomes prospective students, students and community members interested in research and anti-carceral social work and advocacy to contact her.