Jeffery Ulmer

Jeffery Todd Ulmer, born March 2, 1966, is Distinguished Professor of sociology and criminology at Pennsylvania State University and director of its Criminal Justice Research Center. He earned his bachelor's degree at Susquehanna University in 1988 and his master's and doctorate in sociology at Penn State in 1990 and 1993, taught at Purdue University from 1994 to 2000, and joined the Penn State faculty in 2000, serving as associate head of the Department of Sociology and Criminology from 2013 to 2019. His best known research concerns prosecution and sentencing in criminal courts. In the late 1990s Darrell Steffensmeier, Ulmer and John Kramer developed the focal concerns model of sentencing, which explains punishment decisions through the way judges and prosecutors read a defendant's blameworthiness, dangerousness to the community and the practical constraints around a case, and Ulmer has argued for a fourth concern, rehabilitative potential. He has also advanced the court communities perspective, which treats courts as communities with their own organizational culture, norms and local influences.