People

People

  • Sebastian Leon
  • Kenneth Sebastian Leon
  • Undergraduate Program Director, Criminal Justice
  • Associate Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies
  • Areas of Specialization: Crimes of the Powerful; State-Corporate Crime; Race, Ethnicity and Criminal Justice; Political Economies of Justice Systems
  • Office: Lucy Stone Hall, Room A259
  • Campus: Livingston Campus
  • Faculty Office Hours:

    By Appointment Only
  • Education: B.S. (2011) Florida State University, College of Criminology and Criminal Justice M.A. (2013) George Washington University, Department of Sociology Ph.D. (2017) American University, School of Public Affairs

Kenneth Sebastian León is an Associate Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers – New Brunswick. He specializes in crimes of the powerful and racialized social control, both within and beyond the formal boundaries of criminal justice institutions. Prior work related to the criminal justice system includes examining the extralegal factors of the federal death penalty, the policing of Latino men under the pretext of gang interdictions, and migrant detention in New Jersey during the coronavirus pandemic. His current research is supported by the National Science Foundation to study the impact of labor law and immigration policy on workers within the meatpacking industry.

León is a former research contractor at U.S. Department of Justice – National Institute of Justice and has extensive experience studying localized public safety challenges using qualitative and mixed methods approaches. These include medium and large-scale collaborative studies of the Colombian National Police, the Honduran National Police, U.S. jails, and the transnational capacity of MS-13 in the United States and El Salvador.

His scholarship appears in Annual Review of Criminology, Criminology & Public Policy, and Ethnography, Latino Studies among other outlets. His books include Corrupt Capital – Alcohol, Nightlife, and Crimes of the Powerful, and co-authorship of Class, Race, Gender, and Crime – The Social Realities of Justice in America. More information about his research, teaching, and advising can be found at www.ksebastianleon.com

Select Publications:

A Culture that is Hard to Defend: Extralegal Factors in the Defense of Federal Death Penalty Cases. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (2017) 107(4): 643-686, w/ Jon B. Gould. https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol107/iss4/3/

Carceral Ethnography in a Time of Pandemic: Examining Migrant Detention and Deportation. Ethnography (2022) 25(3): 314-334, w/ Ulla D. Berg and Sarah Tosh. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14661381211072414

Code of the Street 25 Years Later: Lasting Legacies, Empirical Status, and Future Directions. Annual Review of Criminology (2024). 7:1, w/ Jamie J. Fader. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-022422-123641

Conceptual and Empirical Obstacles in Defining MS-13: Law-Enforcement Perspectives. Criminology & Public Policy (2020) 19(2): 563-589, w/ Maya P. Barak and Edward Maguire. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12493

Latino Criminology: Unfucking Colonial Frameworks in “Latinos and Crime” Scholarship. Critical Criminology (2021) 29(1): 11-35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-020-09544-y

Migrant Detention and COVID-19: Pandemic Responses in Four New Jersey Detention Centers. Journal on Migration and Human Security (2021) 9(1): 44-62, w/ Sarah Tosh and Ulla D. Berg. https://doi.org/10.1177/23315024211003855

Techno-Bureaucratic Race-Making: Latino (Mis)Representation in Criminology and Criminal Justice Knowledge Claims. Journal of Criminal Justice Education (2023) 34(3): 376-399, w. Andrea Gómez Cervantes. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511253.2022.2155204

Publications: