March 4, 2005

Speaker Biographies

David Farabee is a research psychologist at the University of California-Los Angeles and the director of the Integrated Substance Abuse Programs (ISAP) Juvenile Justice Research Group. He has served as lead analyst for criminal justice research at the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse and as an assistant professor of Psychiatry and a research scientist at the University of Kentucky Center on Drug and Alcohol Research. He is currently the principal investigator of an evaluation of a statewide program funded by the California Department of Corrections to transition mentally ill inmates back into the community, and the co-principal investigator of the Criminal Justice Drug Abuse Treatment Studies and the Treatment Services Impact study-both funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He has published in the areas of substance abuse, adult and juvenile crime, HIV/AIDS, and offender treatment, was co-editor of the recent book Treatment of Drug Offenders (Springer, 2002), and is currently co-editor of "The Offender Substance Abuse Report," a bimonthly report published by the Civic Research Institute. He is also a member of the U.S. Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on HIV and STD Prevention for the Centers for Disease Control.

John H. Laub is a professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland--College Park. He is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Sociology and a faculty associate at the Maryland Population Research Center--both at the University of Maryland. He is also an affiliated scholar at the Henry A. Murray Center at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. From 1991 to 1996, Dr. Laub was the editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology. In 1996, he was named a fellow of the American Society of Criminology, and in 2002-2003, he served as the president of the American Society of Criminology. Dr. Laub's areas of research include crime and deviance over the life course, juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice, and the history of criminology. He was honored with the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association's Crime, Law, and Deviance Section for his book Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life, coauthored with Robert Sampson (Harvard University Press, 1993). He and Mr. Sampson recently wrote Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70 (Harvard University Press, 2003). Both books received the Outstanding Book Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and the Michael J. Hindelang Book Award from the American Society of Criminology.

Jessica Nickel serves as a legislative aid for Congressman Rob Portman (R-Ohio). She handles a variety of issue areas for Mr. Portman, including Social Security, substance abuse, volunteerism, and criminal justice. Ms. Nickel has an extensive background in drug policy with a special emphasis on drug prevention. She has served as co-chair of the President's Drug-Free Communities Commission and as a director for Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA).

Amy L. Solomon is a policy associate at the Urban Institute, where she works to link the research activities of the Justice Policy Center to the policy and practice arenas. Her primary areas of concentration include prisoner reentry and problem-solving approaches to community safety. She currently manages research partnerships with the Council of State Government's Reentry Policy Council and the National Governors Association's Prisoner Reentry Policy Academy. She also manages the Urban Institute's Reentry Roundtable series and is working with several states and communities on their reentry planning efforts. Ms. Solomon has served as a policy analyst and as the acting director of Strategic Planning at the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice. Ms. Solomon has also been involved with several crime reduction initiatives, including the Boston Gun Project. She has served on various criminal justice working groups and committees, including a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the Central Massachusetts Dismas House and spent three years as a juvenile justice evaluator for the Innovations in American Government Awards Program. She is currently on the founding Advisory Board for the Center for Community Safety in North Carolina, on the steering committee for the Reentry Policy Council, and is an advisor to the documentary, "Omar and Pete," by Academy Award-nominated and national Emmy award-winning filmmaker Tod Lending (Nomadic Pictures).

James Q. Wilson was the James Collins Professor of Management at University of California-Los Angeles from 1985 to 1997 and the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University from 1961 to 1987. He currently lectures at Pepperdine University. Dr. Wilson is the author of fifteen books, including The Marriage Problem (2002), Moral Judgment (1997), On Character (expanded edition, 1995), Crime and Human Nature (1985), and Varieties of Police Behavior (1968). He has also edited or contributed to books on urban problems, government regulation of business, and prevention of delinquency among children. Dr. Wilson has been a director of the Police Foundation, a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a member of the attorney general's Task Force on Violent Crime, the chairman of the National Advisory Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention, and the chairman of the White House Task Force on Crime. He is the chairman of AEI's Council of Academic Advisers and a member of the Boards of Trustees of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance and the RAND Corporation.

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