2026 Program in Criminal Justice Graduate Student Research Grant Awards

Claudia Nmai — The Construction of Family Life in the Shadow of Policing

As the criminal-legal system shapes the everyday lives of low-income Black people in the United States, Black youth and adults are disproportionately targeted for surveillance and punishment by the police. Research illustrates how Black mothers calibrate their parenting strategies to manage their children’s vulnerability to criminalization. However, this literature often obscures how the criminalization of youth becomes intertwined with the criminalization of parents and what this may mean for how mothers understand and navigate their parenting roles. The intertwining of youth and parental criminalization is important to consider given that certain policing practices, such as juvenile curfew policies, subject children and their parents—for failing to control the whereabouts of their children—to criminalization. Using the case of juvenile curfew laws in Washington, D.C., this study will interrogate how policing shapes family dynamics. Through semi-structured interviews with Black mothers in D.C., this study will explore how mothers navigate parenthood and relationships with their children amidst heightened criminalization. As juvenile curfew enforcement increasingly becomes a key feature of policing in cities across the U.S., this study provides an opportunity to understand the impact of youth curfew policies on families.

Claudia Nmai is a PhD student in Sociology. Broadly, her research interests lie at the intersection of policing, race/ethnicity, and family life. Her current work explores how encounters with and perceptions of the police shape identity and family life for Black individuals in the U.S. Prior to beginning her graduate studies, Claudia was a Research Assistant in the Justice and Safety Division at the Urban Institute, working on projects centered on survivor safety and alternative responses to harm. She received her B.A. in Sociology from Stanford University.

Omar Olivarez — When Good News is Bad News: Corruption, Accountability, and the Governing Incentives of Local Officials

Anti-corruption audits are often viewed as tools for accountability, deterring misconduct through the possibility that a person's corrupt behavior may be publicly exposed. This project challenges the assumption that anti-corruption audits solely reduce corruption and improve governance. The project develops a game-theoretic model of the relationships between an elected official, the constituents who evaluate them, and public service providers. The model shows that, in a world where audits have not yet been implemented, even corrupt officials are incentivized to act in the public interest due to career concerns: officials have a desire to be reelected. Audits, by publicly revealing an official's true type, eliminate this incentive for corrupt officials, removing any remaining restraint and leading them to extract the maximum rents for the remainder of their term. The model also predicts that audits can induce complacency among honest officials who, now free from the need to prove their integrity, reduce their effort as well. These predictions will be tested using data from Brazil, where a random audit program launched in 2003 evaluated officials across more than 5,000 local municipalities. Together, the theoretical and empirical components of this research aim to inform how anti-corruption audits can be designed to maximize their accountability benefits while minimizing unintended harm to the communities they are meant to protect.

Omar Olivarez is a doctoral candidate in the Technology & Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School. Using economic theory and methods, he studies how information and technology affect coordination within and between organizations. In particular, he studies the implications of AI and robotics on organizational design, the determinants of outsourcing in international supply chains, and the unintended consequences of audits on corruption. He uses econometric and machine learning methods to answer his research questions. Omar received a BBA in Management Information Systems from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to matriculating at Harvard, he worked in product operations at Google and software development at Southwest Airlines.

Melissa Oliveira — Gender-specialized Police and Courts: Impact on Gender-Based Violence and Political Attitudes in Brazil

In Brazil, twenty-six women are victims of domestic violence every hour and one is murdered every seven hours, placing the country among those with the highest femicide rates worldwide. Yet most incidents go unreported: while one in three Brazilian women reports lifetime physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner, only 14% of victims seek help from a Women's Police Station and 45% take no action at all. Brazil's main policy response, the 2006 Maria da Penha Law, mandated two gender-specialized institutions - Women's Police Stations and Special Courts for Domestic Violence- yet there is little causal evidence on their impact, and the few existing evaluations study each institution in isolation. This project asks how specialized police and courts, individually and jointly, affect gender-based violence reporting and incidence, and how they shape women's trust in the police, judiciary, and the State. The quantitative component exploits the staggered rollout of both institutions across Brazil's municipalities between 2000 and 2025, using a difference-in-differences design robust to heterogeneous treatment effects. To distinguish changes in reporting behavior from changes in true incidence, the analysis triangulates administrative data on police reports, health system notifications, female homicides, and calls to the national women's hotline, and tests whether police and judicial institutions are complements in the production of deterrence. With the support of the PCJ grant, the project's current phase centers on qualitative fieldwork across São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasília, conducting in-depth interviews with policymakers, police officers and judges. The fieldwork will also support the collection of institutional data, including implementation records for Women's Police Stations and Special Courts, and build relationships with key Brazilian institutions.

Melissa Oliveira is a Ph.D. student in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, with a concentration in Politics and Institutions. Her research sits at the intersection of political economy, gender policy, and Latin American politics. She is particularly interested in how criminal justice institutions shape gender-based violence outcomes and women's political behavior, with a focus on Brazil. She holds a B.A.H. in Political Science (with a minor in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies) and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. Her work combines causal inference and data science methods with qualitative fieldwork.