CURS is pleased to announce that Carmen Gutierrez, assistant professor of public policy, will be our 2019-2020 Scholar-in-Residence. Her research explores issues at the intersection of immigration, the criminal justice system and health, with an emphasis on how inequalities arise across race, ethnicity and citizenship. A central theme of her work is the use of statistical and spatial methods to address research questions that inform contemporary policy concerns.
Gutierrez’s research plan for her time as Scholar-in-Residence is to examine the relationship between the involvement of the criminal justice system and health outcomes in the United States. She also plans to update current knowledge of the adverse health consequences of criminal justice involvement in the time period following implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Gutierrez was especially interested in the Scholar-in-Residence program because of the Center’s strengths in interdisciplinary scholarship, including geography and housing and community development.
“This proposed project fits well into my current and ongoing research agenda,” said Gutierrez. “One paper from my doctoral dissertation, recently published in the American Sociological Review, demonstrates the ways that the ACA helps narrow health insurance inequalities across gender, race and ethnicity, and education by improving access to coverage among unemployed, unmarried and childless adults.”
Other papers from her dissertation, currently under review for publication, hone in on the ways that the ACA serves adults in the criminal justice system due to the strong overlap between adults with criminal justice involvement and those who are unemployed, unmarried and childless. “In a future project recently funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, I will explore the relationship between the ACA and the size, composition and geographic distribution of the criminal justice population.”
Gutierrez earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin.