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Lycoming College will welcome Kristen Golden, Ph.D., as the speaker for the 24th annual Strauser Lecture. The talk is slated for Wednesday, March 26, at 4 p.m. in the Trogner Presentation Room in the Krapf Gateway Center, with a reception immediately following in the Lady Family Reception area.
Chief data officer for the Office of Justice Data and director of the New Jersey Statistical Analysis Center, Golden will deliver a talk titled “An academic in a world full of lawyers and cops: Impacting policy through data,” during which she will share some of the successes and challenges of working with criminal justice data, the importance of transparency, and how data can inform policy and practice. Golden will walk attendees through some of her public facing work, viewable at www.njoag.gov/ojd.
In her current position, Golden has headed numerous projects regarding criminal justice data, including analyses on New Jersey’s 2017 criminal justice reform initiative. She and her team of analysts focus on data collection process improvements to ensure data are reliable and useful, that analyses are understandable, and that areas in need of clarification and improvement are identified. Her analytic work is used to inform policy, procedures, and practice in the criminal justice system.
Golden has extensive experience creating easy-to-understand visualizations and reports on a variety of criminal justice topics to promote transparency, such as the law enforcement internal affairs and major discipline, law enforcement recruitment and diversity, law enforcement uses of force, mental health and law enforcement co-responses, reported bias incidents, gun ownership, traffic fatalities, asset seizures & forfeitures, and arrests and charging patterns.
With the annual Strauser Lecture Series, Lycoming honors the legacy of Professor Larry R. Strauser, who began the criminal justice major at Lycoming College in 1975. He envisioned a unique interdisciplinary curriculum at a liberal arts college that would contribute to the reformation of the criminal justice system. Under Strauser’s direction the program grew, and today many alumni hold successful criminal justice careers. Past speakers include Ramiro Martinez, Ph.D., professor of sociology and criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University; Thomas Vanaskie ’75, federal judge of the U.S. District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania; and Elijah Anderson, Ph.D., the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University.