Victor St. John

Assistant Professor Victor St. John joins the Glenn College from Saint Louis University, where he was assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice in the College for Public Health and Social Justice and School of Social Work. He is an affiliated faculty member with Ohio State’s Criminal Justice Research Center. St. John previously served as a director of research and analysis for the New York City Board of Correction, an oversight agency for the NYC Department of Correction and NYC Correctional Health Services. Prior to that, he supervised youth detention and placement facilities under the NYC Close to Home Initiative; delivered a cognitive-based intervention with incarcerated youth on Rikers Island for the first social impact bond in the United States; and served in evaluation and technical aid capacities for the John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center. St. John is also a research scientist for Child Trends, which he supports as deputy director for the National Technical Assistance Center for the Education of Neglected or Delinquent Children and Youth, a U.S. Department of Education center.

St. John’s approach to research is informed by his professional background in the field of criminology and criminal justice starting in the year 2010, as well as his individual experiences growing up in Brooklyn, New York. His research agenda can be summed into a singular question: How do we reduce the social and racial harm associated with the excessive use of the criminal justice system? He is a mixed-methods scholar who uses an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to examine the causes and consequences of mass criminalization and efforts to mitigate and end the overuse of the criminal justice system. His research spans the areas of inequality, criminology, criminal justice policy, justice-involved youth, space and place, and health. His work has appeared in a variety of academic journals including Race and Social Problems; Journal of Criminal Justice; Journal of Correctional Health Care; Journal of Crime and Justice; Journal of Qualitative Criminology and Criminal Justice; Race and Justice; and Critical Criminology, among other peer-reviewed outlets. His written works have received awards from the American Society of Criminology’s Divisions on Critical Criminology and Social Justice as well as the Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences.

St. John received a PhD in criminal justice from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York, an MS in criminal justice and specialization in criminal law from John Jay College and a BS in criminology while at SUNY Old Westbury.