Tracey Meares and Mary Pattillo Join RSF Board of Trustees
L-R: Tracey Meares, Mary Pattillo
The Russell Sage Foundation is pleased to announce the appointment Tracey Meares and Mary Pattillo to its board of trustees. They will officially join the RSF board at its November 2024 meeting. Cathy J. Cohen (University of Chicago), who has been on a one-year leave from the board, will rejoin the board in November.
Tracey Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor and a Founding Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. She is a former RSF visiting scholar, co-editor of the RSF volume Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: International Perspectives, and an RSF research grant recipient. Meares was the first African American woman to be granted tenure at both Yale Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. She is a nationally recognized expert on policing in urban communities. Her research focuses on understanding how members of the public think about their relationship(s) with legal authorities such as police, prosecutors and judges. She teaches courses on criminal procedure, criminal law, and policy and she has worked extensively with the federal government having served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Law and Justice, a National Research Council standing committee and the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs Science Advisory Board. Meares is a member to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In December 2014, President Obama named her as a member of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Mary Pattillo is the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and Chair, Department of Black Studies, at Northwestern University. She is co-editor of RSF volume Imprisoning America, co-editor of RSF: The Russell Sage Journal of the Social Sciences double issue “State Monetary Sanctions and the Costs of the Criminal Legal System,” an RSF-Gates Pipeline Grants Competition mentor, a contributor to RSF volumes Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools and Social Class, and an RSF research grant recipient. Pattillo’s areas of interest include race and ethnicity, urban sociology, inequality, housing, education, criminal legal studies, Black communities, and qualitative methods. Pattillo strives to be an expert in Chicago history, politics, and social life. Her first book, Black Picket Fences (University of Chicago Press, 1999), investigated the economic, spatial, and cultural forces that affect child-rearing and youth socialization in a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Her second book, Black on the Block (University of Chicago Press, 2007), focused on gentrification and public housing transformation in North Kenwood - Oakland on Chicago's South Side. Other projects in Chicago and Illinois include a study of how Black parents negotiate school choice and how families make housing choices, and research on the system of monetary sanctions—fines, fees, and other financial penalties—in the criminal legal system. Outside of Chicago, Pattillo has studied the Black middle class in Latin America and is working on a new research paradigm called “Black Advantage Vision.” Pattillo is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political & Social Science.