Leah Jacobs

Dr. Jacobs’ scholarship is at the intersection of social welfare, criminal legal, and community mental health policy and intervention. She breaks with analytic tradition that situates crime and disorder as products of either individual pathology or sociostructural forces and that siloes social welfare policy and intervention from criminal legal policy and intervention. Instead, she thinks about problems of crime and disorder as products of the interaction between social structure and individual circumstance and as relevant to social welfare and criminal legal systems. Her empirical work has investigated the role of neighborhood contexts, homelessness, community mental health services, and individual-level criminal risk factors in shaping outcomes for legal system-involved people. She is currently conducting two experiments to test interventions that seek to prevent criminal legal system involvement by reducing negative interactions between police and youth and by building collective efficacy to intervene in community conflict.

Dr. Jacobs is also a former case manager, program planner and evaluator, and community organizer. She holds a BS in Psychology from Northeastern University, a dual MA in Policy and Planning and Child Development from Tufts University, and an MSW and PhD in Social Welfare from the University of California- Berkeley.

Dr. Jacobs welcomes prospective students, students and community members interested in research and anti-carceral social work and advocacy to contact her. 

Research Interests

• Criminal legal system policy and intervention
• Public mental health and substance use policy and intervention
• Social welfare policy and intervention
• Structurally competent, anti-carceral and abolitionist approaches to social work
• Qualitative and quantitative methods, including geospatial, systematic social observation, and causal inference

Currently Funded Research

Can Law Enforcement Training Address Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality?

Role: PI

Rigorous Evaluation of Community-Centered Approaches for the Prevention of Community Violence

Role: Co-I

Publicly Accessible Publications

Jacobs, L. A., Branson, Z., Greeno, C. G., Skeem, J. L., & Labrum, T. (2022). Community behavioral health service use and criminal recidivism of people with mental, substance use, and co-occurring disorders. Psychiatric services, 73(12), 1397-1400. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.202100530

Jacobs, L. A., & Skeem, J. L. (2020). Neighborhood Risk Factors for Recidivism: For Whom do they Matter? American Journal of Community Psychology. doi: 10.1002/ajcp.12463.

Jacobs, L. A., & Gottlieb, A. (2020). The Effect of Housing Circumstances on Recidivism: Evidence From a Sample of People on Probation in San Francisco. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 47(9), 1097-1115. DOI: 10.1177/0093854820942285

Jacobs, L. A., & Panichelli, M. (2020). From criminalized patients to risk-exposed agents: Reconceptualizing carceral involvement among individuals with psychiatric diagnoses. Deviant Behavior, 41(12), 1540-1558. doi: 10.1080/01639625.2019.1631067

Jacobs, L. A., & Giordano, S. N. (2018). “It’s not like therapy”: Patient-inmate perspectives on jail psychiatric services. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 45(2), 265-275. 

For additional publications, see: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jFU7gnoAAAAJ&hl=en