Valerie Jenness

Valerie Jenness, born March 7, 1963, is an author, researcher, public policy advisor and professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1991, taught at Washington State University from 1991 to 1997 and chaired her Irvine department from 2001 to 2006 before serving as dean of the School of Social Ecology from 2009 to 2015. Her research examines the links between deviance and social control, especially law, the politics of crime control and criminalization, social movements and the public policy surrounding corrections. She is credited with the first systematic study of transgender women in men's prisons, and she has briefed national media and the United States Congress on hate crime.