Earning an undergraduate degree in a certain field does not always reflect a career trajectory. For Natalie Pifer, criminology and criminal justice department chair, it took a decade and several different career pathways until she found her way to her current role as a professor researching and teaching about prisons and punishment. 

As an undergraduate at New York University in the early 2000s, Pifer majored in journalism and politics and interned for New York City newspapers and politicians, working towards the goal of working as a professional writer. But as a 2008 college graduate, Pifer, like many young alumni, found herself navigating an uncertain and rapidly shifting job market, so she pivoted. In her last year of college, Pifer took the LSATs and applied to a handful of law schools in New York and California, with an updated goal of pursuing a career in entertainment law that would keep her engaged in the media field, albeit in a different capacity.

This new path took her to Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where she started pursuing a law degree. During her final year of law school, Pifer began participating in The Center for Juvenile Law and Policy’s Juvenile Justice Youth Education Advocacy Clinic, a pro bono clinic focused on advocating for young people experiencing an educational rights issue, such as disciplinary suspension or expulsion from school or a disability rights issue like access to special education services, while often times also navigating a juvenile justice system issue. For Pifer, her work with the clinic transformed how she thought about law and her career goals as she realized that the clients she worked with were often the most vulnerable but often struggled to navigate the system designed to protect their right to an education.

“I went to law school thinking that law was the way you like made a difference in the world,” Pifer said. “So it was a dramatic moment for me where I was like, ‘wow, law doesn’t work the way that I thought it did. Sometimes, law didn’t solve the problem for the client, even when we, as legal advocates, won the case.’”

So, Pifer pivoted yet again during her final year of law school and applied for grad school with one question in mind: why doesn’t the law work the way we expect it to? Pifer graduated law school in 2011 and immediately started a PhD program in criminology, law and society at UC Irvine, where spend the next years studying how criminal justice law and policies work in the real world, before coming to URI in 2017 as one of the founding faculty members of the Criminology and Criminal Justice program.

“I was lucky enough to get this job and moved across the country to Rhode Island to become a professor of criminology and criminal justice, which is not at all what I expected to grow up to do when I was in college,” Pifer said.

Today, Pifer researches prison and punishment, with a focus on analyzing how reforms to critical criminal justice issues, like solitary confinement and recidivism, are implemented and experienced by people who live and work in prisons and leads one of the most popular majors in the College of Arts and Sciences. Reflecting on the CCJ major’s growth since her arrival at URI in 2017, Pifer highlighted the strength of the department’s interdisciplinary curriculum, the quality of its faculty, and the fundamentality of the questions that underpin criminology and criminal justice as a field of study as being some of the main reasons students gravitate towards the major.

URI’s program combines both criminology and criminal justice in its CCJ major. This is unique, Pifer says, because it allows students to understand the why behind crime as well as the what to do about crime by combining classes on criminological theory as well as on the institutions that are tasked with addressing crime, and more. 

“We start this emphasis with our students immediately by having them take both intro classes on the criminal justice system and on criminology and then give our students the ability to customize how they move through the rest of our curriculum.” Pifer often teaches one of these introductory level classes that orient students to the why behind crime.

“I really love this class because it is exciting to talk with new students about the classic theories of crime and help us understand how the ways we explain crime can inform the choices we make about what to do about crime,” Pifer said.

Pifer’s approach to teaching this class on crime echoes how she approaches the field of criminology and criminal justice. 

“In CCJ, we recognize that how we define seemingly simple concepts like justice, crime, and public safety are actually essential first steps to evaluating whether our current systems are truly effective. How can we know if a CJ policy is working or not until we fully understand the ideas it is designed to address? I do this in my research by examining how a reform gets implemented on the ground and understanding what it really means for the people it is designed to protect.” 

For Pifer, asking these fundamental questions about crime and justice are part of the CCJ’s program appeal. 

“I think our program plays a really important role in allowing students to grapple with the variety of factors that shape how we understand crime and what to do about it. When it comes to crime policy, we can’t discount the role of emotions in the process, right there alongside social science theory and research,” Pifer said. “I think we have to account for all of this in order to move the needle on crime and on justice and doing it in a way that is informed by ethics and morality and by social science. Defining and dealing with a perennial social problem like crime are some of the toughest questions out there, but, given the stakes, they are also worth asking.”

By Erin Malinn, journalism, class of 2028